[edit] Youtube

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dEFKOlZXzn0 (8' Hexayurt Assembly)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yKS4yJto44Y (6' Stretch Hexayurt Assembly)

[edit] Quicktime

Higher quality but we pay for the bandwidth. Please download these and save them locally if you want to view them frequently.

http://files.howtolivewiki.com/tape_anchors.mov (7M) (How to make Tape Anchors - the tie-downs between the roof components and the guy lines on the larger hexayurts)

http://files.howtolivewiki.com/6_foot_stretch_hexayurt assembly.web.mov (56M) (6' Stretch Hexayurt Assembly)

http://files.howtolivewiki.com/8_foot_hexayurt_assembly_video.mov (39M) (8' Hexayurt Assembly)

All Hexayurt Project materials on this page placed into the public domain in accordance with this legal statement and by adding to these pages your release your edits under those terms.

Newsflash: we now have fire test data on R-MAX / Tuff-R. . Please read the Hexayurt Safety Information before building your hexayurt

[edit] Introduction

Let's print a basic curriculum on each Hexayurt so that people can read useful information, relevant to their own health, comfort or survival, on the buildings we are going to send them. Furthermore, let's put the kid's material near the ground, and the more adult material further up the walls.

Sounds like a good idea?

While there is a lot of detail to be worked out, both of the materials we are considering for production units have printable surfaces, and large format printing on flat materials is a commonly solved problem. We can do this.

If we cover both the inside and the outside of the vertical walls we get the equivalent of 600 letter-sized pages on an 8' hexayurt, and 1200 pages on a 12' hexayurt. That's a lot of copy!

So what to print?

[edit] Wikipedia-type Content

We could do a lot worst than pick a few dozen of the more useful articles from Wikipedia and other open-source materials and reprint them. However, there are some severe problems with this approach:

• Wikipedia articles are long and boring
• They are not written as how-to guides
• They use a very large subset of the English language
• Some articles could be just plain wrong and misleading at the time they were taken and printed

However, as a very basic starting point, we could do worse.

[edit] Appropedia Content

The How tos from this web site would provide more targeted guides.

[edit] Repurpose Books

Another approach would be to try and get reuse rights to books like Where There Is No Doctor. However, we need a skilled team to know which books to obtain, and there may be unforeseen problems in the transition between the printed page and the printed wall. However, this approach offers the best access to high quality information in the immediate future.

One possible source of books, already scanned and ready to go, is the Appropriate Technology Library. Some of this content is already available here on Appropedia, such as that provided by CD3WD.

After reading through Where There Is No Doctor, it seems to me that wall/page space will become scarce quickly. There is a lot of information to get to the people, and printing just the basics of a topic won't get the job done, especially when it comes to medical situations with "If... then..." predicaments. This could lead to a need for lots of text on lots of walls.

We might configure the groupings of yurts in camps so that a certain number of yurts were purposed for more detailed information. In a grouping of 10 yurts, for example, 5 might be printed with medical info (ranging from very basic first aid to diagnosing and treating bacterial infections, etc), 3 might be printed with sanitation and camp/yurt maintenance recommendations, 1 might be for posting news about the camp and the after-math of the disaster, and the last 1 might be left available for people in the camps to leave messages for each other.

Of course this will also depend on the length of time a yurt camp is in use -- how much will a single family need to know about preventing heart-disease if they're in a camp for 2 months? Lots of long-term and obscure medical information could be omitted.

So how do we use camps as books? And which disaster situations require which kind of books? Is there a bank of basic educational materials in the public domain for Arabic, English, Mandarin, Hindi, French, Russian, Spanish?

Walls printed with text will effectively become "walk-through" or "live-in" books. Book/shelters. A catalog of some kind will be necessary to point people to nearby yurts with the information they need in a very quick and efficient manner.

Socio-cultural implications of this include changing conceptions of space and territory. Is a yurt the territory of the family who lives in it? How territorial will they be about the information printed on its walls? Is the potential for conflict here reason enough to develop a very basic 'curriculum' for each yurt, so that each structure is completely info-autonomous?

[edit] Custom Basic Educational Curriculum

The right approach is a basic educational curriculum targeted to each area. A BEC would provide introductory reading materials, so that those who already read English could teach others. It would have material for children and adults alike and focus on practical knowledge, explaining concepts like germ theory and crop rotation, thermodynamics in the context of drying food or making fires burn better, and so on.

As an example, consider explaining germ theory to a five year old child in a no-TV, no-Internet village.

You start from what they can see: pick an ant or another bug. Explain that we have large bodies, and the ant only has a tiny body. Explain that there are creatures which are as small compared to the ant as the ant is small compared to us. Explain that these creatures are so small we cannot see them. Explain that a person can get infested with these creatures, causing diseases. This explanation of germ theory seems like it would work more or less anywhere, for more or less anybody, and then concepts like basic sanitation practices can be taught on top of the accurate scientific model.

These basic scientific models are incredibly powerful. Consider that the Standard Days Method gives excellent birth control results with essentially no technological base. Any culture with counting could apply this technique, and there is no solid reason that a stone age culture could not have maintained the technologies to apply this method if they understood the principles giving rise to the practice.

A properly prepared knowledge packet could describe a wide range of tools and techniques, all of which can be implemented with field-available technologies, giving many of the benefits of 21st century science to people in essentially medieval living conditions. Of course, there are severe cultural problems related to magical thinking or cultural taboos which sabotage the success of some of these tools. Deep expertise and monitoring of results are required to ensure that this part of the project works.

[edit] Large Knowledgebase Distribution

There is no need to print the same material on every hexayurt. One approach would be to take a much, much larger knowledgebase and print a common set of materials on every yurt (instructions on hand washing, basic geography, whatever seems relevant) and then fill the remaining walls with parts of the larger corpus. Assuming 50% of the walls are devoted to printing parts of the larger knowledgebase, a 100,000 person camp has several million pages of text available to it. One would require a lot of replication to ensure that loss of a single building didn't make a bigger text useless - long books could span several buildings - and god alone knows how one could do indexing so you could find the building with the text you need on it... but if a sufficiently cheap and flexible printing solution can be found so we can put different material on each building, we could get enormous quantities of knowledge into the hands of those who need it most.

[edit] Language and translation issues

Most of the readily available material we have is in English. Most of the internet-connected writers who might participate in an open project speak English. So it is likely that a lot of the text will at least start in English. The BEC could be written in one of the reduced-vocabulary Englishes. One candidate is the Voice of America's Special English. This might also simplify translation and machine translation efforts.

Also, and this notion needs to be checked - my guess is that in most parts of the world, in a small camp, at least a few people will speak English well enough to teach people how to speak and read it. For short term deployment this is not going to help, but if people are going to be stuck in camps for generations, it seems like we could print as much material in the local languages as possible and the rest of the material in English and hope for the best. One approach would be to have machine-translated local language text running beside the English originals.

My guess is that a combination of these approaches could be tried at first and we could collect field data to see what was most useful.

[edit] Cultural Issues

What happens if something printed on a hexayurt is unacceptable for cultural reasons? The birth control instruction hexayurt winds up in a camp where people are angry and insulted at having improper materials sent to them.

I don't know how to avoid these issues. I don't even know where to begin to address them.

It may be that through mis-steps hexayurt camps are burned down by militant radicals that disapprove of some medical information printed on the walls. But in emergencies where the affected people have nothing left, how likely are they to react violently and destroy the only chance for their family's survival?

Cultural anthropologists should help decide what is printed and how it is printed, but even with their best guesses, some times things will fall through the cracks. This page is for posting whatever speculations or brainstorms you have for the Hexayurt project, and asking any kind of weird question you think might help move the project along. It's a sort of sandbox. If strong ideas get generated here, refine them and post them in the appropriate wiki page (or start a new page for it).

Flying Saucer/back rest Hexayurt. Make slight trapezoids of 4x8 wall panels of 8' Hexayurt. Trim narrow wedges from the ends of the wall pannels. Put narrow, long edge downward. Wall will then go up and out from ground, giving Hexayurt cool flying saucer appearance and also, good backrest angle to walls (though I know it's not recommended--maybe do this only with 2" thick panels or with wall reinforcement.

Tape Eave/Drip Line Make a short eave of tape so that rain does not run down the outside of the wall. Add a 2-5" doubled over flap of tape around edge of roof panels that sticks out beyond the wall. At the very least, make tape awnings above windows and doors.

Insect-repellent panels. Organic & non-toxic. Cheap? How about a "wide spectrum" insect repellent to stave off fleas and other grim nasties too?

Kirkyan Hexayurts. This would take more money than... but if hexayurts weren't just "spimes" -- trackable in space and time, intelligent enough to push info back to the right radio signal --- but "kirkyans" --- spimes that can use environmental information to alter their form and configuration for greater efficiency and problem solving. Autopoeitic systems, environmental controls? Other uses? http://blog.rebang.com/?p=786

How do we get good Internet connection to these rural, poor camps after earthquakes? We can use the net to get very useful info quickly, and also use many apps on it as a 'virtual drive' to save info and come back to it later (like a Gmail accounts). Will the Gatr satellite sphere do this, or what else is needed?

Seed-impregnated hexacomb boards would make a ready to roll food source if the disaster were great enough that the camp would stand for 2+ months (depending on the crop). Just lay them out on the soil and use gray water. The hexacomb could come preloaded with soil. The roots would grow through the cardboard, into the topsoil.

All-season hexayurt As the structural isloation panel has two sides, one silver and one white, you could use the silver outside for hot seasons, and inside in winter. People inside would emit heat that would be reflected and saved, just as in an igloo. Also, any light used inside would reflect on the walls ; maybe it will make it possible to use very few energy for lighting : a bulb driven into a three-corner would spread much light. --- http://www.digital-librarian.com/yurts.html

All Hexayurt Project materials on this page placed into the public domain in accordance with this legal statement and by adding to these pages your release your edits under those terms.

Newsflash: we now have fire test data on R-MAX / Tuff-R. . Please read the Hexayurt Safety Information before building your hexayurt

[edit] Contacts

Lindsey and Vinay

Email is the best way to contact us. Use BeautifulWorldCrew@HowToLiveWiki.Com.

Vinay's personal blog] has Hexayurt news in the "hexayurt" category.

[edit] Project Discussion List

http://groups.google.com/group/hexayurt

Join the group at http://howtolivewiki.com/code/join_hexayurt_group.php We are currently working closely with Andy Buxton and his SleepBreeze personal cooler. Unfortunately we can't tell you very much about their personal cooling system at this point because it has not launched yet, but if you check that page you can get more of the picture. We can reveal a few key features:

• Aimed at cooling the person, not the entire Hexayurt.
• Low energy consumption, battery powered.
• Simple enough that in volume production the price would fall into our general price range.

It's important to understand that the Hexayurt project is a mix of proprietary and open systems. Specific functions, like solar power generation, require technologies which require extremely expensive development costs of a kind which open source projects can't fund. But the fruits of those developments are what we call COTS (common, off the shelf) technologies. The SleepBreeze system is a very good technology in a COTS area: you could substitute a fan, but it would not work so well.

Andy is also consulting with us on more general cooling and thermal issues, like where to position vents and how many we need and what kinds of interior temperature ranges we could expect to see in various conditions.

All Hexayurt Project materials on this page placed into the public domain in accordance with this legal statement and by adding to these pages your release your edits under those terms.

Newsflash: we now have fire test data on R-MAX / Tuff-R. . Please read the Hexayurt Safety Information before building your hexayurt

A hexayurt-like design pattern made from metal conduit.

All Hexayurt Project materials on this page placed into the public domain in accordance with this legal statement and by adding to these pages your release your edits under those terms.

Newsflash: we now have fire test data on R-MAX / Tuff-R. . Please read the Hexayurt Safety Information before building your hexayurt

Fully Funded Project Plan (pdf)

We estimate that it would take about $110,000 to get the Hexayurt project done to the point where it could be tested in the field with people's lives depending on it. That budget would fund a team of two full timers building units, living in them, coordinating both hired consultants and volunteers, to produce a completely tested, finished, documented hexayurt and infrastructure package.

All intellectual property we create or control would be released under an open license, most likely fully public domain, and available for any commercial entity to produce or for organizations like non-profits to source for themselves. Some of our vendors may also choose to open their designs, but if they do not, those products will be recommended and we will do our best to link to information about open alternatives where they exist. Not everything can be provided on an open IP basis, however (for example, LEDs still have many patents, as do NIMH batteries).

However, even $10-20,000 gets us a lot of forward progress - a long term (3-6 month) test of one or two units in one or two climates. A lot more investment would be required before we were ready to use hexayurts in a disaster or refugee situation, but it would at least prove several key concepts.

If you are interested in supporting further development of this project, please contact us. Small, non-institutional donations (yes, your $50 can help!) are welcome as well. For cooking and heating applications.

Substitute for natural gas infrastructure (pipes and plants, trucked in propane) with:

• wood gasification stove
• http://files.howtolivewiki.com/wood_gasification_stove_clip.mov (2M) video of the wood gasification stove from http://Spenton.net in operation

Wood gasification stoves use sophisticated combustion engineering realized in the form of cheap sheet metal forced air stoves. Two AA cells power ten hours of cooking, with a peak heat output of 3KW from finger-sized twigs. Wood gasification stoves are low emissions because the fuel is burned either as gas (volatiles boiled out of the fuel) in super-abundant oxygen blown in by the fan, or as charcoal similarly burned in abundant oxygen.

WG Stoves are rated as 10 times more efficient than open fires, and three times more efficient than high efficiency clay stoves.

Financial model:

• $20 or less per stove, one per household

Fuel costs are low, perhaps $1 per household per week or less. In the context of a small and well insulated shelter or home, even this relatively moderate heating device should provide most or all of the heat required even through the winter in most climates.

All Hexayurt Project materials on this page placed into the public domain in accordance with this legal statement and by adding to these pages your release your edits under those terms.

Newsflash: we now have fire test data on R-MAX / Tuff-R. . Please read the Hexayurt Safety Information before building your hexayurt

[edit] Introduction

This page is about making the hexayurts information rich at several levels.

The basic strategy is to use a variety of media and formats to make information about the hexayurts and about survival and recovery available to affected people.

I. Print useful text on the panels.

II. When possible and desirable, print the panels with 2D bar codes or embedded RFID tags.

III. Arrangement of hexayurts into patterns readable from a distance or from an aerial view.

[edit] Issues arising from this strategy

I.

1. In what language or dialect to you print the panel text?
2. Should there be standing "books" waiting in warehouses, ready for shipment? If so, what is the most useful text to put on the most generic panel?
3. First aid. Hygiene.

II.

1. Expense is a major issue for RFIDs.
2. Security is even more important. RFIDs are hackable, and they can be used as a platform for spreading viruses or malware to other systems and databases (citation needed). Could pirates exploit this by using the info on the RFIDs for ill purposes? Yes. Is this worth worrying about, or is it worth preventing RFID use? Probably not. Benefits outweigh risks.

III.

1. Think Semacode (link) or Kaywa's QR Code (link). Not human-eye readable, but from a distance ketai cams can discern massive amounts of information by the configuration of black and white pixels. What could physical camp configs tell relief workers?
2. Think "eye in the sky". If other communication channels fail, the arrangement of yurts in the camp could communicate information to aerial cams as 2-D barcodes. This is a built-in level of security. Only 2 guys know that if the water-pump pup hexayurt is moved adjacent to the 6th wall of the med supplies yurt it generates a message to equipped cams that reads: "Taliban is moving poppies thru this camp."

[edit] Gallery

Aerial view of camp works like QR code.	This is a standard printed panel. It incorporates at least 2 points from the strategy: eye readable; machine readable through barcodes and RFID.	Sketch of kirkyan concept for hexayurt camps. Kirkyan hexayurts are virtual/real and changes in one environment causes the kirkyan to respond by changing itself as needed in the other.	RFIDs can link database information to uniquely identified objects. Efficient way to track medicines and supplies, and to then deliver the medicines to the proper patient.
People and hexayurts (with attached property, infrastructure, medicines, etc.) are linked with RFID and QR tags. This is a real aid in managing thousands of people after a disaster.

[edit] Hexayurt Object Database

Hexayurt panels, wherever possible, have a 2D barcode or RFID tag attached to each one. The same thing should be done, wherever possible, with stoves and other items.

The goal is that items can be found in the field, their GUID extracted from the barcode or tag, and then that information checked against the database to show the history of this particular object.

This allows for long term lateral studies of several kinds.

The first is object endurance: which items, from which manufacturers, lasted? Which ones are commonly used, vs. being left in the scrap heap. What *worked.*

It's important that tags are per object, and not per class. While 50 stoves may appear to be identical, and were purchased at the same time, lo! the supplier changed sheet metal suppliers half way through the run, and the ones from Batch B rust to uselessness in 4 years, but the others last for 25.

Henry Ford allegedly had staff crawl around in junk yards to see what pieces of the Ford never failed, and were in good useful condition after the rest of the car had died. Those pieces where then allegedly manufactured to lower specifications to save money without impacting vehicle life.

We need a similar approach: understand exactly what got made where, and how it performed in the field.

Additionally, lateral tracking of object movement becomes very important: the stoves dropped in a camp in the Sudan show up in Tanzania, and the locals love them much more than their regular stoves because the Sudanese stoves handle fuel a little differently, for instance. Well, knowing which items are being traded and how they circulate tells us about local preferences, and also about appropriate technology transfer routes.

For this to work, we need a "Stamper" service like http://thinglink.org/ - a service which issues GUID numbers for arts and crafts projects.

Vinay

All Hexayurt Project materials on this page placed into the public domain in accordance with this legal statement and by adding to these pages your release your edits under those terms.

Newsflash: we now have fire test data on R-MAX / Tuff-R. . Please read the Hexayurt Safety Information before building your hexayurt

[edit] Overview

Take your house. Cut off the water, the electrical power, the natural gas, and the sewage lines. That's what a hexayurt is like without the infrastructure systems which need to be shipped with it as an integral part of the housing system.

It helps to think of your own house as you go through this - replace each system in your mind with the one from the outline below. Remember that the systems are huge - the electrical system isn't the wires in your house, or strung along the poles outside - it's the power station, the huge transformers, the high voltage long distance lines, and the aspects of the govenment which regulate the grid, plus the banking infrastructure to keep all that stuff paid for.

To provide services in the traditional way in the developing world is extremely difficult. Even though some of these line items look expensive, it's important to remember that they are very, very cheap compared to their first world equivalent service infrastructures!

[edit] Hexayurt solar

Substitute for national grid or heavyweight solar with:

• 1 80 watt panel per 40 households,
• connected to a 15 minute AA battery charger (i.e. the new gen rayovacs)

These items connected into a "power pillar" - a walk-up charging station where people come with their empty NIMH batteries, drop them into the charger, wait 15 minutes, then take them home. Assuming a 10 hour charging day, that services 40 sets of batteries.

Appliances for this system include:

• lighting: cold cathode fluorescent lights (see: http://ledmuseum.candlepower.us/dbright.htm ), LED headlamps, etc.
• communication: cell phone chargers, FRS-type radios, other battery powered radios etc.
• entertainment: pretty much any general purpose device can be found in a AA configuration, like televisions (http://www.amazon.com/Casio-TV-980-2-3-Portable-Color/dp/B0000CGCCM)
• wood gasification stove (see below)

What won't work:

Heavy-draw mains appliances (toasters, video projectors)

Financial model:

• $400 for the panel, $100 for the charger and pillar. ($12.50 per adult)
• $10 for 4 fast charge AA batteries for each adult.
• $10 or less for each lighting unit. ($32.50 total)

$50 per household should comfortably buy everything required for basic electrical services. A bare bones system (lighting and stoves only) would be less than $20 per household because the panel could be split between 80 - 120 households.

[edit] Hexayurt cooling

We are currently working closely with Andy Buxton and his SleepBreeze personal cooler. Unfortunately we can't tell you very much about their personal cooling system at this point because it has not launched yet, but if you check that page you can get more of the picture. We can reveal a few key features:

• Aimed at cooling the person, not the entire Hexayurt.
• Low energy consumption, battery powered.
• Simple enough that in volume production the price would fall into our general price range.

It's important to understand that the Hexayurt project is a mix of proprietary and open systems. Specific functions, like solar power generation, require technologies which require extremely expensive development costs of a kind which open source projects can't fund. But the fruits of those developments are what we call COTS (common, off the shelf) technologies. The SleepBreeze system is a very good technology in a COTS area: you could substitute a fan, but it would not work so well.

Andy is also consulting with us on more general cooling and thermal issues, like where to position vents and how many we need and what kinds of interior temperature ranges we could expect to see in various conditions.

[edit] Hexayurt gas

For cooking and heating applications.

Substitute for natural gas infrastructure (pipes and plants, trucked in propane) with:

• wood gasification stove
• http://files.howtolivewiki.com/wood_gasification_stove_clip.mov (2M) video of the wood gasification stove from http://Spenton.net in operation

Wood gasification stoves use sophisticated combustion engineering realized in the form of cheap sheet metal forced air stoves. Two AA cells power ten hours of cooking, with a peak heat output of 3KW from finger-sized twigs. Wood gasification stoves are low emissions because the fuel is burned either as gas (volatiles boiled out of the fuel) in super-abundant oxygen blown in by the fan, or as charcoal similarly burned in abundant oxygen.

WG Stoves are rated as 10 times more efficient than open fires, and three times more efficient than high efficiency clay stoves.

Financial model:

• $20 or less per stove, one per household

Fuel costs are low, perhaps $1 per household per week or less. In the context of a small and well insulated shelter or home, even this relatively moderate heating device should provide most or all of the heat required even through the winter in most climates.

[edit] Hexayurt water

Substitute for water purification plants and pipes, or trucked in water with:

• Solar water pasteurization.

Build a simple solar cooker into the side of each hut, using the same building materials as the rest of the unit (reflective insulation boards). Primary use of the cooker is heater water to 160+F for the full day to sterilize it (and the container). Remaining issues around reliable indicators that the water has been fully treated are being worked on by a variety of groups.

I do not suggest cooking on the solar cooker as a core technology. General field reports seem to indicate solar cooking doesn't go over terribly well in many areas.

Financial model:

• $10 or less per household for the solar cooker.

[edit] Hexayurt sewage

Substitute for pit latrines, septic systems or conventional sewage handling with:

• area-appropriate composting toilet design

Financial model:

Possibly as cheap as $20 per household in warm areas, assuming shared toilet banks. Practical, realistic designs have not undergone the "value engineering" necessary for this application yet, so are still too costly, although clearly a cheap, basic, functional unit for any given climate could be created.

Water System

[edit] Priorities

• public health is the overwhelming priority.
• low cost is essential - if it's not cheap, it won't be used as much and won't achieve as much.
• low ecological impact is very desirable if it doesn't compromise public health.
• suitable for various cultural practices. Target users may be accustomed to using water to cleanse (but can most often cope with small amounts of water), or other anal cleansing^W methods, so the device should ideally tolerate sticks, rocks, paper, or whatever else is likely to be thrown in.

[edit] Options

• Composting toilet
• Biogas toilet, too large scale for the specs; for longer term settlement (due to capital cost, time for construction); relatively unproven. (E.g. Bio Latrines in Kenyan Slums.)
• Non-composting, non-biogas toilets
  • Emphasis on public health (rather than sustainability or treating the waste as a resource).
  • e.g. the BiPu^W
    • Cost? Chriswaterguy to find out.
    • What's the status of the solid material afterwards? Can be composted?
    • Proven in the field, including Aceh.^{[verification needed]}
• Ultra-cheap systems, based on the Kamal Kar's work. Any applicable to this situation? Chriswaterguy to find out.
• What about small community based Constructed wetlands?

[edit] Development Status

Together these systems appear to combine to provide the majority of the services provided by the pipe-and-wire infrastructure harness of a first world household for a cost in the neighbourhood of $200 per household for a relatively plush system, and a minimalist installation could be under $100 per household or less with more resource sharing.

The vast majority of the products required to put together this package are common, off-the-shelf items. However, very few if any of them have gone through the rigours of deployment in the field conditions we are talking about. The CCFL flashlights are an excellent example: available in stores for around $10, with an excellent battery life and 10,000 hour or better tubes, they appear perfect. But the are not waterproof, only water resistant.

What would the failure rate be if we deployed them in a refugee camp? Would the manufacturer - either Eveready, or the plant which makes them in China, be willing to make small design changes or product a special edition, or would we hit dead ends unless we were willing to have a custom model produced from scratch (a whole different line of business.)

My hope is that we can rely on the open source approach to solve many of these problems - that as long as all of our intellectual property is open, then domain experts can help us find answers to all the questions that come up, without feeling like they are helping a for-profit or partisan group. Free IP means freedom to participate for many people. We can give the companies who produce the products we want tweaked or improved the ideas on how to do it, and they can use them or not as they please.

My estimate is that it will take 10 to 15 years for this approach to be fully vested - tried in the field, failures identified and rectified, and technologies matured to the point where it becomes obvious to all parties that we have a scalable solution. Whole systems design is hard, and takes time, and a lot of lives are at stake.

But if we don't start now, we aren't going to have that fully finished solution 10 or 15 years down the line.

This is not to say that we could not push much harder and much faster - deploy units in the field and just see what happens, and learn by doing.

PS: the $200 number is padded for a more expensive toilet, and for a share of village-scale utilities like the one-per-village 2 kilowatt central power utility.

PPS: http://www.rmi.org/sitepages/pid560.php (the Sustainable Settlements Charette, where a lot of the definition of scope happened)

http://worldchanging.com/archives/002202.html (some older writing I did on infrastructure which might help fill in some details in my unusual perspective on this stuff.)

All Hexayurt Project materials on this page placed into the public domain in accordance with this legal statement and by adding to these pages your release your edits under those terms.

Newsflash: we now have fire test data on R-MAX / Tuff-R. . Please read the Hexayurt Safety Information before building your hexayurt

[edit] Disastr / Networked Domestic Disaster Response

[edit] A Note On This Plan

disastr.org is the current public homepage of this project.

A novel approach to handling mass refugee situations in the United State.pdf - the original proposal. Please note that there is new material on this Appropedia page which is not in the original proposal.

I presented this outline to two of the Directors of the American Red Cross in Washington, DC earlier this year. Their response was extremely favorable, calling the plan "incredibly innovative; as good as anything we have seen."

I talked with FEMA at the end of August 2007 and they are also extremely interested in the plan, and I believe that American Red Cross is discussing it with the Californian branch of FEMA also. This is a real and credible proposal, not just something you found on the internet. I'm publishing it widely because it is a community-led disaster response plan rather than something driven from centralized resources like those of government agencies.

This is about you.

The technology parts of this plan: a GIS, perhaps some online training tools, and a database application are well below the level of complexity of many services offered by, for instance, Yahoo or Google. An organization like that could build and host this service (except the financial infrastructure) as a way of helping ordinary Americans protect themselves in the event of a natural disaster or terrorism.

To do the supply chains for the building materials would require assistance from building supply companies like Home Depot or Lowes, and the tape is going to need to be stockpiled - call 3M. But with these pieces assembled, plus perhaps some of the additional infrastructure components outlined in the presentation PDF, there is no reason why an extremely high level of resilience could not be achieved without requiring complex government planning.

You can build a hexayurt yourself.

You can build a disaster response capability based on the hexayurt by working with your community and some companies.

[edit] A novel approach to handling mass refugee situations in the United States

• Vinay Gupta
• Hexayurt@gmail.com

[edit] Introduction

This document outlines a low cost ICT/training approach to handling millions or tens of millions of domestic refugees in the event of a natural disaster, epidemic, industrial accident, WMD or other event. The basic building block of this response is a low cost building called the Hexayurt which can be rapidly manufactured and assembled using common materials by semi-skilled teams. We then proceed to show how these simple, high quality shelters can be distributed and sited in a way which enables the non-displaced population to seamlessly absorb the displaced people at minimal cost.

[edit] Hexayurt Properties

A hexayurt is a 166 square foot "microbuilding" assembled from one to two dozen 4' x 8' panels. These panels are typically off-the-shelf polyisocyanurate building insulation boards, as commonly found at Home Depot and other building supply outlets for around $15 ea. Harsher climates and longer term use requirements can be met by custom runs of this material. The building geometry is extremely simple: the roof is made from half-panels, and the walls are made from full panels - an entire building requires only six straight cross-panel diagonal cuts. There are no framing timbers or other structural components. The pieces are then joined using an off-the-shelf 6" wide 600lb breaking strain industrial box closure tape or a custom adhesive. The entire process - from panels in a truck to a finished building - takes about two hours the first time and more like one hour with an experienced team of five or six. The design is in the public domain so can be used by anybody.

[edit] Shelter for One Million Families

One hexayurt can house a family group of up to five people. Building and siting one million units in three days is achievable at a cost ballpark cost of under $700,000,000 ($120 per head) given preparation, training and supply chain management. The notion is to use these buildings as “guest quarters” for refugees, to be added to existing family homes that provide hospitality and infrastructure.

[edit] Manufacturing the Hexayurts

The materials cost for each hexayurt is around $200 for very basic temporary units, through to about $600 for long-term high durability units. Cutting a factory-quality hexayurt takes about two hours with a single table saw, or about 30 minutes with garage space, two saws, timber jigs and a small team to cut, move stock and finished panels. Pre- assembling the walls and roof into a folding unit takes about another 30 minutes for a second team of three to five people. A unit built this way can be assembled on site in about an hour by a team of three. Each shop requires well under $1000 of equipment and can produce around 50 units (housing for up to 250 people) per day assuming three shifts. Note that the manufacturing capacity costs are around the same as two units.

Given these figures, manufacturing one million units in two days requires 10000 shops. Equipped from scratch, this is $10,000,000 of capital investment. However most of the required equipment is already in widespread use - table saws and 2x4 - so most of these shops would not have to be set up from scratch. Indeed, in a real disaster situation, the goal would be to press all available capacity into service.

The materials themselves, at over-the-counter prices, would cost $600,000,000. Polyisocyanurate boards are in common use all over the country in the building industry. 4 billion board feet (approximately 500,000,000 4'x8' panels) are used every year, which gives a daily supply volume sufficient to shelter around 600,000 people. Latency for further manufacture on an emergency basis has not yet been researched. It is likely that the various manufacturers of these products could stockpile the liquid chemicals required and step up production in a crisis. Another issue is tape - 6" wide bidirectional filament tape is widely available but not widely used. It may make sense to simply stockpile the required tape all over the country. Shelters can be constructed with standard 3" tape, which is extremely widely available, but requires more skill and can be a hit-and-miss process.

[edit] Staffing the Manufacturing Operation

The Red Cross training courses all over the country. Adding an "emergency shelter" training course, where volunteers are trained and certified to manufacture, site and assemble hexayurts and similar building systems, seems like a reasonable way to build local capacity. People with the certification could additionally register as having a shop with a “crew” – a staff like a volunteer fire department – who could manufacture units at a given capacity if materials were available.

To have 10,000 shops ready in the area around a disaster seems unrealistic at first. However, with the exception of the Mid West, cities cluster. A multi-year program to build local capacity could easily find 5,000 shops in most major cities. In a crisis, capacity close to the disaster is activated first. The trained staff of each shop would be augmented by other, unskilled volunteers who would pick up basic skills on the job.

[edit] Alternative Manufacturing Approach

Over the past year, it has become apparent that a basic, but functional, hexayurt can be cut in the field without power tools. This approach gives an hour to hour and a half end-to-end construction time for the shelter. Heavy duty insulation boards cannot be cut using this approach, but they comprise only a few percent of the total board volume. Standard boards as found in the supply chain can be cut as effectively with a snap-blade knife as with a table saw, which makes field manufacture eminently feasible.

[edit] Siting the Buildings

Buildings should be put up in the back yards of ordinary American families. The infrastructure requirements of one million families cannot be effectively met by large, centralized facilities. However, existing oversupply is so large that, for many Americans, providing a place to cook, shower and watch TV for a guest family in an emergency would not only be no hardship, but a welcome opportunity to participate. However, it is unrealistic to expect this kind of meeting of overcapacity and need to happen ‘on the fly’ when considering mass evacuation.

Therefore a national register of families willing to site American refugees in their back yards would be created: a centralized GIS database showing locations where hexayurts could be sited would be created and, in the crisis, individual evacuation maps would be prepared.

The first step is that the GIS marks off the areas which are effected in the disaster, and a first estimate of the refugee population is made. Secondly, information about local transport conditions is added: if major highways are out, they would be taken off the map. Finally, the system begins to identify the “closest” sites for hexayurt placement based on a transport- driven distance metric, rather than simply distance. These homes are contacted by an autodialer or SMS message and an automated system asks if they will be there to help receive an incoming family.

This “readiness roster” is then passed to a second system which communicates with the manufacturing shops; shops in each area are married to a set of sites and, as units come off the local production lines they are transported by pickup truck (one truck can take 5 units) to the home sites, where neighbors assemble them and wait for the refugees to arrive. I would foresee an additional “transport corps” which would help take refugees from centralized pickup points to their interim homes.

The requirement for databases with cell phone access to manage this entire process cannot be overstated. Although clearly a backup system based on paper is possible – maps printed off at a centralized location and then flown into the disaster zone and handed out to refugees – the challenges in keeping basic communications available and building robust interfaces to the planning databases are likely a lesser challenge.

[edit] Special Considerations in the Nuclear Scenario

In the nuclear scenario there are four special considerations.

• a large number of extremely severely injured people
• radiological contamination of individuals clothes and personal effects
• radiological contamination of individuals themselves
• massive national shock

Four measures may help.

Firstly, the ability to rapidly establish field hospitals, using military equipment for treatment facilities, and hexayurts and other temporary shelters for wards may address the need for segregated hospital facilities for victims.

Secondly, "wash and change" stations must be established at the perimeter, where people who show low levels of contamination can shower, abandon their contaminated clothing, and step into new outfits. These items can be provided by the large retail stores - simply transporting the stock wholesale is probably the best immediate approach. Shower greywater should probably be routed into settlement pits (which can be dug rapidly with backhoes) so that radioactive particles are not flushed directly into drains.

In practice, these "wash and change" stations also act as a filter - after washing and changing, people who still show significant levels of radioactive exposure may need to be quarantined, and can be expected to become very sick in the immediate future, where as those who show levels closer to background exposure may be safely resettled into the general population.

People who have taken extremely high levels of contamination may require seclusion while the short half-life isotopes degrade. Rather than siting shelters for these people in areas with existing infrastructure (homes) it may be wiser to site buildings for them in a green field area, with some separation from the general population until their condition stabilizes.

Finally, the overwhelming desire to Do Something can be channeled into shelter construction and housing the homeless after a nuclear event. There is a lot that people can do to help.

[edit] Managing the Supply Chains

In order to smooth this process, every American should be issued with a debit card akin to the FEMA cards or prepaid debit cards as commonly used. These crisis cards should ship in the “deactivated” condition. When a crisis happens, the cards should be enabled either nationally (in the event of a huge crisis) or locally – for example, turning on all the cards for a given set of zip codes. All the cards for people on the rosters as either manufacturing hexayurts, hosting refugee families, or otherwise providing services should also be enabled, with balances reflecting the expected expenses incurred by each group. For example, a manufacturing shop could easily go through $30,000 of building materials in two days and should have credit available to this task. This “pay as you go” approach to managing the supply chains has multiple benefits including empowering individual Americans to help themselves, and working smoothly with existing supply chain systems in place in building supply stores.

Because these cards are issued in peace time to individuals, and have strong identity information attached to each one, it should be possible to track fraud and abuse. It should also be possible to call an automated service and requisition additional card capacity so that, for example, an individual traveling in the disaster area can call in, activate their own card, and get out of trouble.

[edit] The Hard Case

This entire approach involves using overcapacity in the national system to cover Americans affected by disaster. However, in a bigger disaster, the national communications and electrical infrastructure may simply be unavailable. What then?

In these scenarios, local stockpiles of tools, material and information provide the only hope of effective local grass roots response. For example, schools could be nationally understood as being gathering points for planning groups, and school buses could drive their normal routes at all hours of the day and night to provide transport to these aid hubs. The Hexayurt infrastructure package (pdf) for the developing world includes heating, electrical lighting and various other essential services and an upgraded version of this package could be manufactured and stockpiled for use in crisis conditions in the United States.

All Hexayurt Project materials on this page placed into the public domain in accordance with this legal statement and by adding to these pages your release your edits under those terms.

Newsflash: we now have fire test data on R-MAX / Tuff-R. . Please read the Hexayurt Safety Information before building your hexayurt

(in progress)

[edit] Walls and Roof

1. quick-and-dirty units fabbed directly from materials from home

depot or lowes. That's what we did at strong angel. Basically we're talking about Tuff R and Super Tuff R.

1. same materials but precision cutting of angles for tighter

assembly. that means a table saw. ideally we'd find a local wood shop and have them cut for us because I'm, er, not the guy to be doing that work and keeping my fingers.

1. higher spec materials (see Dow Thermax HD) which may need some

wrangling to obtain. Two or three inches thick, better foil facing, generally much more like what you'd use in an American disaster.

1. hexacomb cardboard (http://hexacomb.com/) which can be

manufactured on site from flat pack core materials, so the 1"x4'x8' board is made from a core about two inches by six feet by one inch, and a couple of rolls of foil. Hard to explain, see the "Rapid Deployment Concept" page on http://howtolivewiki.com/hexayurt/

1. Weyerhauser has a really good waterproofed triplewall cardboard, as

used in the Global Village Shelters. We're trying to source some but having problems, but of all the materials, it's probably the one closest to spec for developing world use if somebody wanted to start making units ASAP.

[edit] Plywood / OSB

http://openfarmtech.org/weblog/?p=340 - $132 plus paint for 166 square feet. Unbeatable.

and there's a ton of unedited video and pictures here:

http://www.files.howtolivewiki.com/open_source_ecology_plywood_hexayurt_build/

I think there's scope for an approach here where there is no flashing used, but (for example) the roof triangles over-lap a few inches at the center of each triangle and screws hold the boards together, and at the roof edges, the roof goes over the lower of the two boards comprising the roof triangle, and is screwed directly into place.

Could be hell to waterproof, could have structural problems, but my intuition is that there's an approach here which does plywood with no fasteners beside screws/nails which might be very useful for some circumstances.

[edit] Corrugated Plastic

This is generally not a recommended approach because for most applications, polyisocyanurate boards with aluminum facing are a better bet for long life and insulation properties. However, should you wish, here's how to do it.

I had a little think about coroplast again, and spotted two things I have missed the first time we looked at coroplast.

We can now offer a pre-fab or field-fab hexayurt which folds up very much like the existing folding units. The mechanism might change just a little on the roof.

As a bonus, the coroplast hexayurts can be fastened with pop-rivets rather than tape, which cuts the price even more. Pop rivets are five cents each, and we'd use one about every six inches. They go in with a cheap manual tool or a power tool.

The trick for strength is that for the roof, where two panels come together, you take about four inches of each panel and make a crease. The panels are put side by side, with the 4" strip bent up at 90 degrees to each panel, forming a fin.

Those fins then re-enforce the roof from wind loads.

That fin - that vertical ridge - is then folded over in half, forming a 2" fin - and pop-riveted in that position. This connects the two panels, and and produces a structural reinforcing fin which is also watertight because there is no route for water to enter the building's roof, except by going up the fin, through the tight folds, and into the building.

A similar approach can be taken at the roof edge, incidentally producing a rainwater harvesting gutter if done right.

Taking down the hexayurt would be a matter of using bolt cutters on the rivet (light ones, maybe even tin snips) or just ripping the rivets through the material - note the holes would only be in the fins.

With a little additional work, I'm also pretty sure we could make this entire assembly fold. There might be some fiddly little cuts or creases in the coroplast to make it work, but nothing you couldn't do with a craft knife or a hack saw. We could also spec an 8' roof pole to go into the center of the space, which removes all and any structural issues about the coroplast permanetly by putting it in tension, and it will simply never tear in that configuration (*very* strong in tension). I should have thought of that before.

Or consider the IcosaPod direction, and use ?triangular? box girders on the structure. They could, for example, be fabbed on the edge of each panel, or possibly done as separate items. Might be a good way of getting the roof pole also.

[edit] Tape

• 3M bidirectional filament tape, 6" wide.
• Ideally we need a one stop tape; a duct style waterproof, bidirectional filament tape with a foil face.

[edit] Tent Pegs

All Hexayurt Project materials on this page placed into the public domain in accordance with this legal statement and by adding to these pages your release your edits under those terms.

Newsflash: we now have fire test data on R-MAX / Tuff-R. . Please read the Hexayurt Safety Information before building your hexayurt

[edit] Why are the military interested in Hexayurts?

The short answer is that the military is always looking for new ways to solve problems.

The long answer is more complicated.

[edit] The Long Answer

The role of the military changes over time. Things are changing at the Pentagon. In 2005, Gordon England signed 3000.05 which says that the military has to develop really advanced capabilities in fixing things up, and that they should get about as good at fixing things as they currently are at breaking them. To be more precise, it says:

Stability operations are a core U.S. military mission that the Department of Defense shall be prepared to conduct and support. [Stability operations] shall be given priority comparable to combat operations and be explicitly addressed and integrated across all DoD activities including doctrine, organizations, training, education, exercises, materiel, leadership, personnel, facilities, and planning.

Stability operations are conducted to help establish order that advances U.S. interests and values. The immediate goal often is to provide the local populace with security, restore essential services, and meet humanitarian needs. The long-term goal is to help develop indigenous capacity for securing essential services, a viable market economy, rule of law, democratic institutions, and a robust civil society. (emphasis added)

This is a mandate for military-funded development of appropriate technology resources. Nothing else is even close to fulfilling this requirement.

I believe what's going to come out of this directive in the long run is high quality solutions for shelter, for housing in general, for power, for water, for lighting, for cooking, and for every needful thing.

I built Hexayurts at the Strong Angel III demonstration in San Diego, CA, and Combined Endeavor 2007 in Germany. I also presented on them to a group of senior logistics officers at the Pentagon, and work with the "Expedient Infrastructure for Transitory Populations" project. Buckminster Fuller worked extensively with the Department of Defense for many, many years, and I hope that I am helping keep his ideas alive for the current generation of the military.

--Vinay Gupta 08:40, 2 August 2007 (PDT)

All Hexayurt Project materials on this page placed into the public domain in accordance with this legal statement and by adding to these pages your release your edits under those terms.

Newsflash: we now have fire test data on R-MAX / Tuff-R. . Please read the Hexayurt Safety Information before building your hexayurt

[edit] Hexayurt Project at Burning Man 2007

The Hexayurt Project just won the Participate! Treehugger / Current.TV / Burning Man prize for eco-nifty Burning Man stuff. In honor of this event, I have linked one of my playa pictures. Never let it be said that weirdos can't get things done :-)

The serious stuff is at:

• Hexayurt Presentation PDF - refugees, including infrastructure like solar lights, wood stoves and clean drinking water using SODIS.
• The Hexayurt Mass Evacuation Plan - evacuating cities in an American context.
• http://appropedia.org - the wonderful folks hosting the Hexayurt project and thousands of pages of other sustainability information. You're on this site right now.

[edit] What is a Hexayurt

A hexayurt is a shelter I designed for refugees and other people with a small housing budget.

Please watch the two minute video introduction at Hexayurt.com

This Hexayurt was made from about $200 of materials, mostly from Home Depot, and took three hours from unloading the truck to a finished building. The ball is an inflatable T1 to orbit.

The Hexayurt is completely free. It's great for Burning Man. Anybody can use it.

This means you.

[edit] Why is this a good idea?

Millions and millions of people do not have proper housing. Designing like you give a damn can help.

Oh, you meant why for the Playa?

That's simple. Hexayurts really enhance the Burning Man experience. You get two or even three hours a day more sleep. You have a cool place to hide out mid-afternoon. You have a warm place to party at 4AM.

In short, it rocks.

That boiling early morning? You sleep right through it. At 9AM a tent is an uninhabitable solar cooker, a hexayurt is blissfully cool and dark. Sometime around 11AM, maybe you wake up, mist the hexayurt down to cool it off and doze for another fifteen minutes, then get up fresh and ready for another wonderful day. On the Playa this is life-changing because it means that at the end of the week, you're still fresh and sharp and ready to have fun. Your gear is dust free, and you feel great.

This is like extending your Burn by two days every year.

And you did it yourself, without lugging an RV with air conditioning to the Playa. You built your own shelter with your own two hands. It's creative and very participatory. By building a hexayurt you're joining a community of engineers and creators who are helping to transform the planet.

Hexayurts aren't just for the playa, they're for the world.

PS: Don't be alarmed by all the military folks in the hexayurt construction videos. They're friendly!

[edit] How do I build one?

The basic instructions are super simple.

1. Buy 2 rolls of six inch wide bidirectional filament tape, like