I have just got my first assignment from the Fine Arts II class I am taking - Designing an emergency shelter for people involved in natural and worldwide disasters. The emphasis on this project is the research, and also coming up with a structure that is cheap, easy to build and eco-friendly. I am to work in a group of four, and we are to present our design to the class and discuss the design process. I think this will be a great project for me to improve on communicating an idea from conception to development, which are often my weaknesses.
The first step for all of us was to sit down and come up with the basic needs of people in a natural disaster. This turned out to be a far wider subject than we had time to discuss, so we chose to narrow down the brief to a current natural disaster - The floods in Pakistan. This gave us a subject to deal with and a background to research, both culturally and economically.
We came up with a list of immediate and vital needs, and started to research and come up with design ideas. The work of Shiguru Ban was given to us as an example in our design brief, he designed emergency shelter for the Rwanda Genocide 1994, as well as many other world natural disasters. He is an architect so we were inspired to look into more unusual and clever structures, and were all drawn to a pleated or folded type of construction.
Something that was easy to build and carry was something of importance in this design process, so a folded construction would be perfect to easily transport as its flat, and can pull out to a large size. We took into consideration the ethical needs of the families in Pakistan, and were aware of the large size of family, and extended families that exist, so again the folded construction seemed ideal. We did some more research into the possible materials we could source for the shelter, and wanted to keep it as 'eco-friendly' as possible. We managed to contact a local company in Sweden that prints advertising banners, often seen on lorries, and discovered they have a huge amount of wastage when the banners are finished with and simply throw them away to be burnt. We thought this material would be perfect to use in our designs as it was recycling an existing product and would provide shelter from the elements. together with this, we needed to provide a frame to support the structure, and I remembered that a lot of the world's Bamboo comes from Pakistan and neighbouring India - a perfect solution to the ethical implications of transporting materials. So we did some more research into the areas affected by the floods, and one area which was not so badly flooded was one of the biggest bamboo industry areas in the country, so we went with bamboo in our designs, and also implicated it into the hammock style sleeping areas. Bamboo contains a natural antiseptic and could help keep the spreading disease at bay. We also designed a water collecting panel in one of the folds, which could collect safe drinking water from the rain and dew drops for the families, something that would be important with all the filthy water surrounding them. We put together all our research and made paper models of our ideas, and one final model from canvas to show the over all structure of our design.
The feedback was very positive from the tutors which was really encouraging, and overall I feel the task really opened my mind to the details and the process that go into a design.
If I were to do this project again, or had more time, I would have liked to come up with a design for on the water, where families could attach their 'Pods' together and float until the water receded.
