Online charrette now open

ANNOUNCEMENT: Join the Institute in creating housing solutions for the rural province of Guanacaste, Costa Rica. Participation is open to all professionals, students, and design enthusiasts from every country in the world. Visit the Official World House Costa Rica Online Charrette site to learn more. END OF ANNOUNCEMENT

If (like many folks) you're wondering what 'charrette' means we can save you a trip to Wikipedia - it's an intense period of design activity. Anyway have a go.

New websites

There are two new websites attached to the program:

Institute Without Boundaries which gives some info on the program

World House which, funnily enough, provides info on the World House Project

As always, comments are welcome.

Interdesign

You're invited.

Re-thinking

We're often told that IwB is an experiment. And it's the nature of experiments that you don't always get the answers you were expecting. Our recent trip to Costa Rica threw up more than a few of these. For example the community of Matapalo, the small town that is the case study for our work, was most concerned about social issues like alcohol abuse. To be honest we'd arrived with some great town planning ideas, some beautiful schemes for the town square and some great housing concepts. We hadn't thought so much about tackling social issues directly and it was with some trepidation that we started to explain our ideas. Thankfully our thoughts were well received but it really did make us stop and think on our return to Canada. What are we really trying to achieve with this project?

So this last month has included a lot of discussion and rethinking. We're just coming out of this process clutching new project briefs and sunnier dispositions. The projects have changed quite a bit and (if we get our shiny new briefs approved tomorrow) we'll have something to start shouting about.

Rural Studio

Most of the IwB team headed off to OCAD (Ontario College of Art & Design) last night. They had a great presentation from Rusty Smith on the Rural Studio. You can read about it yourself so suffice to say that his talk and their work was very inspiring. It was of particular interest because the IwB is currently in the middle of its World House Project. On the face of it it seems that we're trying to do similar things (affordable housing) but listening to the talk made the students aware of how different our approach is. The Rural Studio is an architecture studio. If the IwB was to be described (and we're still working this out) perhaps it is a multidisciplinary design studio. This means that it mixes different kinds of designers together and also brings in experts from other fields. The thought here is that complex problems can't be solved from within only one discipline. That's that hypothesis - you need to bring lots of different skills together to get rounded solutions. But just how you do this is being worked out while we work on projects. Right now the students are thinking about how to experiment and uncover what kinds of interdisciplinary practices work best. Should we look at a problem through the lens of a particular discipline lead by an expert from that field? Should we work in pairs from very different disciplines (computer science and interior design)? Should we try to find some common approaches and all work together? We'll let you know how the experiments go over the coming months.

Blog slackers

APOLOGIES for the silence. It's a been a hectic start to the new year and we haven't quite factored in writing the blog. We'll get better. Promise.

We're back

After a nice long Christmas break, the Studio reopens and the usual frantic pace is resumed. Everyone is busy putting together a research report following our trip to Costa Rica. It's an important document that will inform everyone taking part in a online charette (of which more later). We're also continuing work on the laneway house concepts from last semester. This time the designs have to be fleshed out more, right down to the furniture. We'll post some pictures soon.

Oh and you may have noticed that the worldhouse.ca website is under construction. We hope to have this up and running in the near future. We'll make an announcement here when it's functioning.

Back soon

We're on vacation. Normal service will resume shortly.