This is an open hardware project.
And it’s an open hardware project with no electronics to speak of.
There are a few electronics. Let me give you the electronics.
So, I wanna point this out, it's the direction open hardware is going.
You wanna take one of those and pass them on?
These is some lights.
I don’t think we need that light. It's probably okay without it.
[audience: alright for the video]
Ok, cool.
These things here are hexayurts, and these ones are Burning Man.
And you can see, they are just, they are little houses, right.
They are, sort of, housing-pod-things.
And they’re incredibly easy to make.
We'll just, right, take a look at them.
I want to suggest that this is an example
of open hardware taking a different direction.
And this is the direction I think open hardware is going,
that it’s becoming more and more like software,
where you just casually hack together physical artifacts.
And my speciality happens to be housing and infrastructure
and sustainable developement,
but you can do anything this way.
So, let’s think about this,
if we take laziness and impatience and hubris,
instead of being for software,
as a way of thinking about hardware. Right?
What’s the lazy, impatient, you know, ambitious way
of doing hardware systems. Right?
So, these lights that I’m passing around,
have not been formally announced as open hardware yet,
but they are 7 dollars, right?
Look at that thing. 7 dollars!
[Audience: 7 dollars!] 7 dollars!
Now, the difference that that makes,
as an open hardware project,
you can sell these as open hardware
incredibly cheaply in the developing world, right?
And, you know, that's not the direction we typically think of open hardware.
Open hardware typically is microprocessors and all the rest of that stuff.
No, there’s a different direction here.
So, laziness, hubris and impatience, right?
150 square-meters of buildings built by 6 guys in 2 days.
Does that sound useful for CCC, maybe?
[Audience: How many?]
7 buildings: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 buildings.
Large, 150 square-meters between them, 6 guys in 2 days.
And it wasn't really very hard work. Right?
This is a radical breakthrough building technology. You know.
This place is Maslowtopia,
you can see in the bottom corner,
you've got the google street view,
you know, the map, they do a high-res picture of Burning Man every year.
This was a huge camp with these units.
I didn't even know these guys were building this thing.
I just, after the event, I saw some pictures of this.
They didn't ask me how to do anything.
[Audience: They didn't ask your permission?]
No, they didn't ask me how to do anything:
they just downloaded the plans and built the damn things. Right?
So it's an open hardware project
in massive full-scale replication
because it's really, really simple.
And the simplicity, right - lazy, impatient, hubristic - right,
the simplicity is what allows the idea spread.
So how do you make a hexayurt?
You need this very broad tape.
You need to know how to make this thing called the tape anchor,
which is like a, you know, like a knob,
where you've got a special way of using rope to make a fastener.
So the tape anchor is a special way of using tape to make a fastener.
And then you need these polyiso panel material
that they sell at any babas [?],
and that's all there is to it.
It's a really really simple system.
And all of this stuff you would look on the internet,
you can find the references for how to do these things.
Hexayurt in wood.
So, this really shows like how the thing is put together.
The wall is just a whole 1.2 x 2.4 panel.
And this is the standard size for all industrial sheet materials:
cardboard, plastic, wood, metal, sandwich panels,
can you think of anything else?
It's just the standard industrial size for materials.
The roof pieces are half of that size.
So you take a piece, you cut in half. Right?
If you happen to be making it in plywood,
you can take, you see these wooden blocks, light coloured sections?
So that's just a piece of 2-by-4 [wood]
that's been cut with a 30 degree angle on it,
and you screw the building together with those.
And you're done!
So, I mean, that's, thank you very much, that's the talk!
[audience laughs]
So, ok, there's a little more to it, right?
But, you know, I want to make the point that, actually, you know,
that picture is pretty much all there is to know about the basic hexayurt.
It's that simple.
If you happen to be making it using, you know, this kind of material,
you need to get tape and you need to know how to make a tape anchor.
If you're making it out of this kind of material,
you need to know how to make these little wooden blocks,
you need to know how to cut that much plywood and screw it.
But really this is all there is.
And then there's all the stuff [$$5:14$$ you worried] on top of it.
But the basics are so incredibly simple, that right now, in 5 minutes,
you've all aquired the basic knowledge of how to make hexayurts.
And if you had to figure out the actual details
to make them out of any given material,
you know, you're smart people, it's not going to take you very long.
It's an idea that spreads incredibly quickly.
So, this is the first hexayurt that was ever built.
You can see the solar panel that drives the cooling system.
The swamp cooler.
It's 1.2 meter squares that is made of, Burning Man 2003.
God that's a great party!
So, this is the configuration space of hexayurts, right?
You’ve seen the basic ones in two materials.
Geometry, the material choice and the construction technologies
are the 3 big variables.
So, this is the different kinds of hexayurts that exist:
that's a six-foot hexayurt
stretch hexayurt
pentayurt, which has a nice steep angle on the side [?] for dealing with snow
standard hexayurt
stretch hexayurt
double stretch
double-height double-stretch, alright,
and that's your configuration space.
Obviously you could connect the damn things together any way you like.
$$6:26$$. Big hive [worm?] type things pretty easy to do.
[Audience: make a giant "C" out of that]
Yes, you could make a giant "C" out of that pretty easily.
You could make a bunch of small Cs. I mean ...
[audience: "Does anybody see where this is going?"]
(laughs)
If you have enough hexayurts, you know,
you could make a big C in any font you liked.
[Audience: Now, what do we need to represent this form
that you see on the window behind you?]
One of those? I if you've got 4000 people coming, right?,
at 5 people per hexayurt gives you enough hexayurts
to do realize quite a high-res version.
[Audience: do you know that the original size of c-base
has a diameter of a mile?]
It's about the size of Burning Man. Entirely reasonable.
[332 people]
That's fine. You wind up with 400 hexayurts,
that's a 20x20 pixel array, you'll be fine!
So, other ways of constructing these things, right?
This is a kind that you make instead of with panels, with tubes.
So you have a frame like this.
The advantage this has over the standard geodesic dome
is there are only 2 connectors,
there are only two section pieces,
so the triangles are full length,
and the hexagon around the top are missing a few inches per piece,
a few centimeters per piece.
So it's only two components.
And the walls are vertical,
so you could take two of these units and connect them directly together
with no connection problem.
$$8:02$$ So you can actually have very modular pieces,
and the materials are sized in such a way
that you can make the fabric cover really easily.
This is the fabric cover instructions.
And you could make zero waste cover,
if you want to go down the route of having frame.
We're also at the point, cos the project started by 2003,
and by 2011 we've also got new designs that came from other people.
This is a thing called the h13
and you can see it's still using full sheets and half sheets.
And there's this corner thing you do at the front
that gives you a full 2.4 meter entryway.
Cos the conventional hexayurt has a low entry way,
which is a pain in the arse.
This one has a high entry way so it's easy to walk in and out
and it's only one more panel.
This is one that was made for a party for Canada in the middle of winter.
It's actually quite a clever piece of engineering.
It's 2 sheets of thin plywood sandwiched around some insulation foam
and you see the yellow band around the side?
It's the webbing strap that you use in a truck to hold the load on it.
That's being used as a tension rim
to stop the building fall into pieces.
So probably you'd open that strap
and you take the building down again.
[Audience: Pure genius!]
Right? But, you know, that stuff is like 20 dollars a strap
and it's a breaking strain of 8 tons, so why not use it for construction?
Laziness, hubris and impatience!
Can you imagine a lazier building for the middle of Canada?
Could it possibly have more impatience?
$$9:30$$... building materials … strap off a truck, dude!
Then, take a look at this structure.
This is longer on the hubris side.
So there's your standard hexayurt in the middle,
and then there's these two dirty grey big domes.
Look at the size of these things. 45 square meters for 30 sheets worth of material
so the ratio of material to surface area:
Each board is 3 meters,
it needs 30 boards so you get 90 meters worth of materials for 45 meters of space
{10:00} The thing is basically a perfect hemisphere.
And it only uses whole boards and half boards.
So all those shapes are 1.2 x 2.4 meter boards
either cut in half or used full. Right?
Woo! Suddenly you're beginning to talk about really big construction
with zero waste and no screwing around.
And because all of these hexayurts are using the same components,
imagine you've got a standard kit of parts,
and you rearrange the buildings you need for a given event,
now we need lots of small ones, now we need some big domes.
It's all the same connectors, it's all the same panel sizes.
It's a flexible architecture. Interesting things happen.
And I want to make a point:
The reason that Buckminster Fuller didn't get to this stuff is that
Buckminster Fuller was optimising for the wrong thing.
He was optimising for minimum mass
which is of course what you want in a space station.
If you've got a mass-dependent drive technology in zero-g,
mass is your critical factor.
But, if you're operating on the ground in the gravity well $$11:04$$
with standard materials from an industrial supply chain,
you’re looking for a different optimisation.
You don't want minimal mass, you want minimal waste.
And that means using a different branch of maths,
in this case it's concave tiling.
So it's the same mathematics as for things like Penrose tiles
to figure out wether you can get it tight.
We get back to the hubris part:
I think if we'd had this technology in the 1960's,
the hippies would have won.
Because the problem with geodesic domes was that
the damn thing's really hard to build and would always leaked!
So all the communes failed because they couldn't afford to build houses! Right?
[Audience: (laughs) Interesting theory!]
Places like Drop City, all of the houses leaked,
everybody was unhappy,
people just decided to go back to the suburbs
because they wanted a house that didn't leak.
I'm telling you: this is the technology of victory.
This is how the freaks take over the Earth.
You know, look at the size of that dome, right?
There are plans on thingiverse
to download laser-cut plans to make these domes,
if you just look for "nearodesic" or "hexayurt".
Look at how big [compared to] the standard hexayurt.
It's huge. You should $$12:11$$ build four of them [?]
You know, this notion of having a single panel repository,
where you can reconfigure the buildings if you want,
using the same basic components,
I think that is the way that this stuff is gonna go.
I don't know how to make the panel connectors yet, to make it possible,
but when we figure out how to do that,
then imagine just being able to rent from some central service
you know, 27 panels, for 4 domes you're going to use for the weekend
and then give them back on monday morning.
Configurable building.
So we've covered the geometry.
Everybody agrees pretty large configurations based on geometry?
Wait till we get to the materials.
[sound-engineer: Please, get closer to the microphone. Thank you.]
So these are the materials we've done already.
And it's basically anything we could get our hands on,
you take a look at it, "Yeah, I could make a hexayurt out of that".
the connection technology changes a little depending on your material.
Ok, you know, this one is heavy, we're gonna use bolts.
That one is light, we're gonna use tape.
Maybe we could make some more metal connectors.
You just sort of look at your material, you figure out your connector,
and you apply the connector to the material, and there's your hexayurt.
We haven't done very much with metal,
because it's expensive and it's a pain in the arse.
We haven't done very much with structured insulating panels,
because they are expensive and it's a pain in the arse.
The really hot thing we haven't done yet,
that I'm really eager to do, is ferrocement or spray concrete.
You know concrete sprays?
[Audience Yeah]
Ok, so, imagine you -
[Audience: No, I don't know]
Ok, so you put concrete in a big sprayer and you spray it.
[audience laughs]
It turns out to be a lot harder than that in practice.
In fact there are companies that come and
spray your things with concrete for you, right?
Your neighbour has a car that's really annoying you,
you come, you tell 'em which car and you have it sprayed.
[audience laughs]
So you build one of these hexayurts out of this light-weight foam material.
You spray with concrete on the outside,
you spray with concrete on the inside,
now you have a highly insulated concrete permanent building.
And it's only 1 cm of concrete inside and out,
so the building is still relatively light,
so you can do things like put hexayurts on top of existing buildings. Right?
Now, you know, this has potential, nobody's done it yet.
Actually, so, there's something about printing designs on corrugated plastic.
Highly printable materials have [?] corrugated plastics.
You can print anything you want outside the hexayurt.
So imagine taking a picture of the place,
doing the 3D projection to know exactly
what you've got to put on each side of the hexayurt,
and then printing a camouflaged hexayurt
which is completely invisible
because it looks like you are looking straight through it.
All of this is possible.
Ok, construction techniques.
[audience: That only works from a single point of view.]
Well, maybe, the eye is very lazy,
so it's posible that we'd get something that works from multiple points of view
and it looked a little bit wrong as you walk along one side
and you wouldn't really notice.
{15:00} But I don't know: nobody's tried it so we've got to do some experiments, right?
So, there are lots of different ways of doing this stuff
depending on whether you want to be just a one-off unit,
whether if you want it to be folding,
whether you want it to be folding as a single component,
again it's a big configuration space.
This is a completely folding hexayurt unit
that was built by some German army dudes in Stuttgart for an exercise.
[Audience laughs]
Oh, yeah, the military love this hexayurt.
They are super into them.
Which is a long story.
So, you know, that building thing is a single module
and I've got some video in here I can show you the video in a second.
Or if you just go to http://hexayurt.com/fold there's all the folding hexayurts there.
This a different kind of folding hexayurt
so this one is much bigger and it's two components:
The triangles are the roof and the walls are the walls -
rectangles are the walls.
So the whole roof is this single star thing
and then you pull this star-thing open and there is your roof.
And this happens to be built inside a gigantic geodesic dome in Eindhoven.
$$16:11$$ Which is built ... might remember ... Red Cross ...
So, this is kind of where I see the future of this whole project, right.
Because it's open hardware it's beginning to be comercialized.
There is a resale market in America for hexayurts.
So people build them for Burning Man and sell them afterwards
and the market value seems to be 500$ a unit.
Getting to this point where you can spray the damn things and make them permanent,
it's gonna be the way to do this.
That opens up a whole new set of terrain.
Also rural squatting, so you take a van,
you put 12 hexayurts in the back as a foldup
You drive out to an abandoned farm.
You live in them for 3 months.
Somebody comes and servest you a court order and says you must leave.
You put them back in the van, and you drive 30 miles down the road.
It's all [?]
This is also a really important detail:
Ultraviolet light eats everything.
So the big advantage of the hexayurt is that we use a foil surface.
You know these foil surface panels.
That stuff will last a really long time in the outdoors.
So the ability to have rigid buildings that last a long time
because they've got an appropriate UV protective surface
is really key to getting this stuff to work,
if you want multi-year buildings.
Because UV will ruin any kind of plastic eventually.
And this thin shell concrete thing, you know, that's gonna come.
So that's the hexayurt part.
Let me show you two other cool things.
Cheap ID is a barcode and crypto-based solution for managing digital identites.
You take a passport.
You generate some digital signature that you have seen the passport.
You put the digital signature on a piece of paper
together with a jpeg of somebody's face
And then you have an anonymous digital identity
that's still $$17.57$$ [pa??] by nation-state credentials.
What you would do with that, I don't know.
But you’re smart people you'll find a use.
Got be some use for it, right,
like ID-cards for things where you want people to get in
but you don't want necesarly to reveal anything
other than the fact that somebody’s allowed there.
And there's this thing which is the dartboard of death.
ODeath.
[audience: Yeah I perfectly understood that part,
you can also call it the dartboard of doom]
Dartboard of doom.
(voices acting like Lord vader)
Let me explain this before we get silly.
There's only six ways people die:
too hot, too cold, hunger, thirst, illness, injury.
And the services that protect you from dying of these things
are split through different levels of society.
Individual person, household, village,
community or city, region, country and world, right.
So you have this notion of a stack of interlocking services
that provides the essential services.
This is a design tool that I've used when I was thinking about
doing things for war refugees camps.
So it's a way of figuring out that we have actually
covered out all the essential needs within the concept of core technologies.
So this is sitting out there, again, this is under the creative commons license.
It models everything up to and including state failures.
There is no software support for it yet, so we do it all with spreadsheets.
Spreadsheets suck.
So this is a really useful analysis tool,
and its the kind of thing that we are tryin to begin to think
to develop some kind of software to support.
If anyone’s interested in this stuff, give me a shout.
So, that was it.
I'll turn off recorders and I'll take questions?
[voice: Yes, sure]
You want to see the folding videos?
OK, hang a second.
I don't think I have put this machine on the network.
(silence)
There's the crap animation GIF
Have you seen this by the way?
It's a 15 euro USB chargeable, awful awful horrible quality loud-speaker.
But they are incredibly loud and they're dirt cheap.
Now I can show you, let's see...
So this is the German army dudes video.
(silence)
{21:50 or so} What? No! Go away!
[video: Shall we try again (laughs).
One of these days, we'll get just the right angle
and we’ll understand how to make it work,
and once we understand why, then it will be easy.
Understanding counts, understanding counts.
open-close, one-two-three]
It’s called polyiso, polyiso.
[So, what makes it so hard?]
It's a cheap insulation board.
[I don't know either, that's why I'm asking you.
Ok, so let’s give that a try.
Yes, oo, ok, you got it.
Now, what did we do that made it easy that time?
[mumble] oposite ends [?]]
This is the red cross, one,
The prototype we did for the Red Cross.
Sorry it's an animated GIF, there's video but it's really slow.
This is a smaller size that someone did at Burning Man.
(silence)
And that's -
{24:10} [Roof herd - retreat! Not through the puddle.
Your feet are gonna get wet.
Go around, go around!
Oh, what are we gonna do! Okey!]
So this one we had material that was 3 meters by 1.8 meters.
So we modified the design slightly and wound up with this huge structure.
It's like 24 or 30 square meters in size.
Just enormous.
[wall ... 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 ... that will be the problem ...]
There's the sixth side! [wall ... Okey?]
[Does that look about right? Looks about right to me.
Ok, so, roof folks!
Now, here we're gonna have a bit of a problem
because we don’t want the bottom of the roof to get wet, do we?
So we're gonna get everybody and we're gonna open the roof in mid-air. Ok?
Does that sound remotely possible?]
So this is another clever thing that we've learned.
Which is what I call "gang carry".
So, if everybody involved in the lift is carrying
less than about 10 kilos, maybe 15,
you get very very fine motor control of the lift,
regardless of how heavy the object is.
So you can actually take a hexayurt that's made of plywood, right?
It's 12 sheets of plywood, 3/4 of an inch thick,
and you can lift it with 4 people or 3 people on each side,
so you got a gang of 18-25 people doing the lift,
and you can just pick them up and walk with them
because it's got so many people lifting it
that each individual person is only taking a little weight.
And that turns out to be a important technique light-weight construction.
And it's very hard to get people to do
because everybody expects lifting a heavy object to be hard work.
And the idea of using so many people to lift it the heavy object becomes easy.
People can’t get their heads around until they've done it.
Everybody's looking confused: "shouldn’t this be heavier?
What are we supposed to be doing here?"
I and then you start moving
and instinctively everybody tends to coordinate and it just sort of works.
(mumble) See, we‘re on ice here. It's quite -
[Now comes the tricky part.]
So people have to feel off the front [?] run around,
go inside, then take the [?] back again.
It is very slow, very careful movement.
But you can do it even in plywood,
even if the material is really heavy, it still works.
[Audience: I see. No door?]
No, you don’t do windows and doors in hexayurts, so we say.
So, it’s a kind of ritual,
putting the roof on,
taping the roof in place,
and then cutting the door.
We kind of do if for fun, but it’s a really nice moment.
[audience: ???]
If you've got a space station you can use transport ... fine.
[I have a question.
for the geodesics stuff ... material]
I’ll tell you what:
when I turn off the cameras and recorders
you guys be comfortable and ask me questions,
then we’ll take questions.
So, thank you!