The Story of HabLab

We have built our 3,000 square foot living unit – HabLab – in 2012 using bricks from our open source Compressed Earth Brick (CEB) press. Here is a summary of the process that began in 2011 with the Global Village Construction Set Kickstarter Campaign, and ended in 2012 with water well drilling, water lines, insulation, and finishing. We were able to give LifeTrac about 200 hours of field testing throughout the process.

The Story of HabLab – 2011-2012 from Open Source Ecology on Vimeo.

This year, we are planning on building one or more OSE Microhouses for on-site staff at Factor e Farm. The Microhouse will probably be a hybrid CEB structure with a WikiHouse roof. We still haven’t delivered on the Natural Building Workshop reward from Kickstarter – so we intend to build the Microhouse this year in part to deliver this reward.  We are busy recruiting the team and revamping for critical 2013 – so we have a solid management structure for delivering on all of our goals.

The team behind WikiHouse is led byAlastair Parvin, who presented an excellent TED Talk a couple of weeks ago at TED Long Beach. I talked to Alastair at TED regarding potential collaboration. We are considering a design jam for bioplastic extrusion to make the actual panels that make up a WikiHouse. Here is our conversation from TED:

There’s now a WikiHouse group working in the favelas of Rio De Janeiro – now building furniture and expanding to housing in the future.