Architecture for Humanity | Cameron Sinclair | Talks at Google

Thanks everyone for coming. This is an exciting event. My name is Greg Powell. I am a member of the authors at Google and Innovators at Google Team. Today I have the privilege of introducing Cameron Sinclair, the Executive Director of Architecture for Humanity. So a couple of statistics before we get started. One in seven people globally is living currently in a slum or refugee camp. And There are about 3 billion people worldwide without water or sanitation at their immediate disposal. Providing adequate shelter to people is as such, one of the greatest humanitarian challenges that we're currently facing. And so Cameron is here today to talk a little bit about what him and the Architecture for Humanity group is doing. So a little bit about Cameron. He's been a guest speaker for NPR for BBC CNN International, and he also has also spoken at Google before at our Zeitgeist event. His book Design like youe Give a Damn is a compoundium of innovative projects from around the world that are really demonstrating what the power of architectural design is and how it can really improve and impact people's lives. So today we're going to hear.

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Little bit about the book, but also what his efforts have been post Katrina, the impact of the Open Architecture Network and the Open Architecture Challenge, which is a competition to design off the grid technology centers in developing world sites including Ecuador, Kenya and Nepal. So please everybody, a warm welcome for Cameron Sinclair.

Thank you. Okay, I'm going to thank you again, especially not only for inviting us down, but it's to be going gorgeous outside and to come into a dark room, although the AC is nice, is a brave move. So the name of the talk is called We Don't Ship. But more importantly it's how do I present 300 slides in 50 minutes? So I'm going to go through this very quickly. So Architecture for Humanity was founded in 1999 by myself and Kate Storr to bring design services to communities in need. But more importantly, not only to provide those services, but to give designers and architects a unique opportunity to work in areas where not only they transform the lives of others, but in a way they transform their own lives. They come back, we have these kind of tour of duties where people have escaped out of their cubicles and they go do six months in Sri Lanka or in South Africa and they come back not only revitalized, but with a new outlook on what it means to build for people. We focus our attention in a couple of ways. Firstly, after natural disasters, where the resources are scarce and there isn't the expertise to do long term rebuilding, but also in areas where there may not necessarily be designers or architects. I'll do a quick talk about our story or my story, what we're doing at the moment, the work of others around the world. And then the Open Architecture Network, which is a network to allow designers to collaborate and share in an open source process. So this is 25 years ago. The small boy in the corner you see looks exactly like me because it is me. I grew up in a rough neighborhood of South London. It's an area where they invented the word hooligan. So not only was it a rough neighborhood physically, but environmentally it was a tough neighborhood. Concrete block housing, scarce parks. Quite frankly, it was amazing to me that I could walk a mile in one direction and be in this kind of beautiful, tight knit neighborhood where people living in the same socioeconomic standing. Nobody was rich where I grew up. But the difference was I lived in a post World War II, bombed out area and the architecture that was built there was not only inhumane, but it was just unfriendly in all aspects. And so I was influenced to become an architect not because of great cathedrals or skyscrapers, because I lived in bad architecture. So it's a different approach. So when I thought about, I don't know how many of you have had Lego, but that was a major, major impact in my life. I built Lego like crazy. I think I probably have the largest collection somewhere in London. And I had the idea that when you built buildings, it was about not only providing a space for the client, but you're building a specific building in a community. So you are going to affect that community as a whole. So you not just have the responsibility of providing the design solution for that client, but also the responsibility of the effect you have on that community. So 15 years ago I was idealistic, 17 year old, I was going to go off to college to be an architect to try and create spaces that will improve the ways that we can not only improve our lives, but the lives of others. However, when I got there, it seemed that most architecture schools were focused on, I think the phrase is form follows finance, or I think more importantly is form follows fevered ego, which is that we were creating these kind of blob like or razor like spaces that had no contact with the community and they were more about creating jewels in the city and less about creating cities that are jewels. I became the black sheep of my college. My focus was on refugee housing. How do you help homeless communities in inner city areas? And they kind of looked at me as like the ugly stepchild in school. However, stubbornness actually is another phrase for vision. And my vision wasn't based in some sort of utopian vision, but in reality. And the reality is that 95% of new residential buildings in the United States do not use the services of an architect or a designer. They're basically chicken box McMansions sprawled throughout the United States. And so when I, you know, I would travel between the US and Europe, I trained in Europe, and people would say, you know, American architects suck. You know, just look at the buildings that are there. It's not that American architects are bad, it's just that there are no American architects working on American projects. And, and what you see here looks like trailer parks on the outskirts of a city is actually middle to upper income housing in Seattle. So this is basically the best you can get. This is half million dollar ranch houses. So after college I still had that kind of altruistic blood in me. And also I was broke. Some of you in the audience are fairly young and probably have something called college debts. And I certainly had those. And so I went to go and work for a firm under the title which is known in our profession as a CAD monkey. I am super glued or stapled to a cubicle. And then you work for 14 to 18 hours on a desktop doing CAD work. The problem that happened with automation of the architectural industry is you became more and more removed from the client and more focused on just sitting in front of a computer doing red lines and drawing squares. And the sad reality is that I can give you a guided tour of New York and I can tell you what CAD program built the building, but not who the architect was. So right there you can see a disconnect. But while I was working in the daytime, at night I was seeing these conflicts erupt. And I was thinking, how can architects get involved? And for me it was Kosovo. And I watched the thousands and thousands of refugees streaming out of Kosovo into the camps of Albania, Montenegro. And I began to think about a thesis project I did which was to build 5 to 10 year self built housing that would basically be transitional structures that communities would live in whilst they rebuilt their own homes. And this was first focused on New York's homeless population. But I thought as a young designer, well, why can't I redo this for returning refugees in Kosovo? So I was a bit of a presumptuous kid in my 20s. Well, that's not that far ago. But I talked with a couple of people in my office and they kind of liked the idea. And I said, well, we really need to find a Client that understands the needs and the vision that we have. So I looked on the yellow pages for the general number of the UN, you know, 1, 800, UN and I said, I called up and I said, could I speak to whoever's in charge of refugees? And, you know, they said, okay, I'll put you through. Suddenly, it dawned on me. I'm 22 years old, and on the other end of the phone is a guy who's one of the heads of the UNHCR who's responsible for all the refugees globally. And he's saying to me, you know, this is a really great idea. I like what you're doing. We've never had an architect come to us with a plan like this before. Could you and your firm come into our office and present your project to us? At which point I put down the phone and, well, quite frankly, I didn't know what to do. Thankfully, there is an alcoholic beverage called Sam Adams, and I bribed a number of my friends with cases of these to basically put suits on and go to the UN and pretend to be a firm. So we show up at the office, I present a project, and it becomes apparent that the need for this sort of housing is not only broad, but vast in the scale that it's not a few hundred thousand people, but it's millions of people globally. And so rather than doing the project myself, our team decided to start a nonprofit called Architecture for Humanity and launch a design competition and challenge the profession to really show not only what can be achieved, but what ideas are out there. And I've never gone to nonprofit school. I never went to finance school. I don't know how to run a non profit. I was doing this at night. We basically collected 700 bucks, started a website. Well, within eight weeks, we had over 300 ideas from 30 countries around the world. What's most fascinating of which is not only did they come from all over the globe, but we even had designs coming in from Yugoslavia. So it was not only crossing geographical boundaries, but political ones as well. And most interestingly, the designs that came from Yugoslavia said in their messages to us, please understand, we are not at war with these people. We're designers. We want to help. Is it okay that we can enter? And I found this really remarkable that people still felt that they had to ask permission, but there was a whole array of them. And I'm going to go through these very quickly. This collects all the rainwater. It's done by Bassak Alpen Shmeyer, who is US and Turkish, collects all the rainwater creating fresh, clean water. There's a lot of waterborne diseases that happen in refugee camps. The genocide in Darfur is not the killings from the Janjaweed, but the lack of sanitation and power to the Darfur population creating this kind of, you know, non unwritten genocide. This is an inflatable hemp house. You grow hemp, you sew it together, you inflate it, and then with a thin layer of concrete, you create a paper mache shell. You plug in life units which has water, a kitchen, and you can connect another pod together. It was built in less than 24 hours by the design team. The only comment from the jury is, if there was a fire in the village, would anyone leave? I think most of the jury were around in the 60s, so I think you know what I mean. This is utilizing a shipping container, opens up solar panels, create the energy. It has rainwater collection systems. And these use this Gambian wall you see on highways. You open up a cage, you fill it with the rubble of the destroyed homes to create homes. And these are pallets, Tens of thousands of pallets go into a war zone or a post natural disaster delivering food aid, flip them on their side, fill them up with local material, you have a house. So most of these designs came in somewhere between 300 to $3,000. So we were geared up and we found that because we didn't have a non profit, we really couldn't access the funds that we had raised. We raised over $100,000 and that went into the rebuilding of schools and health clinics and help feed and clothe returning refugees. But with no access to those funds, we decided what we really needed to do was to start a nonprofit so that once you control funds, you can control basically the level of design and to make sure that the quality control is high enough. So fast forward eight years. Currently, as you can see, see, we've got about a dozen projects globally. Certainly there's a lot of focus in sub Saharan Africa, in Southeast Asia post tsunami, and because of Hurricane Katrina, we're focused in East Biloxi, Mississippi and New Orleans. We are a decentralized operation. I am not the president of the organization. My job title is eternal optimist. I don't control anyone. And what you can see see is we have six people in the office, about 20 design fellows, we have 47 design chapters and approximately 5,000 volunteer designers and architects globally in about 104 countries. Okay. For some reason, keynote doesn't like me. Today. This will go forward. Whoa, whoa. So as you can see, these chapters are all over the place. Some of them are virtual. We have about 1800 people on Facebook, but we also have about 600 people in London and 700 people in New York, all working on local projects and actually building projects. In New York we worked on a number of physical projects, but they're also running a competition to look at what happens after a major natural disaster hits New York. For those who don't know, a trailer park has a density of about 20 people per acre. And for New York it's about per lot. So a square lot, city blocks, you can get about 20 families in. New York City has 200 people. If a major earthquake or hurricane hits New York City, you would displace more people than the whole Gulf coast just in Manhattan alone. So looking at the idea of how do we deal with that situation? Minnesota is focused internationally. There's a lot of international NGOs based in Minneapolis and they've actually built a number of these San Francisco's, building a new city block in Bayview. And then we worked in LA, worked with SketchUp to do a mobile design lab which is going to high schools. Most of our funding goes to design build. A lot of our funding comes from individuals under 24. These are mainly high school students that are doing hot chocolate sales and bake sales. That means we take money from anyone and we're very diverse. If you think about traditional nonprofit, they do a mail out campaign, they spend thousands of dollars. We, we have never done advertising, we've never done a mail out campaign. We've only used the web and as a result most of our funding comes from the web. We have fashion designers from Alabama. Yes, I said Alabama. We have a virtual band that raises money for us in England called Gorillaz. And then we have Eastern European snowboarders who compete in competitions and sell their gear on ebay and raise money for us. So kind of very diverse, but so is our designers. They're predominantly female, which is interesting given that the architectural profession is male dominated. They also skew young. Part of that reason is that you have young designers who really do want to change the world. And then once they finish college, they find out they have to be 60 years old before they get commissioned to design their own building. There is no glass ceiling in our organization. If you're a 20 year old and you have a great idea, we will partner you with a licensed architect and implement it. Why do you have to waste 40 years to be given that opportunity? So how do we work? We're not relief workers. Architects and designers should not be traveling into a natural disaster and offering help. This is really where the Red cross and international NGOs like Doctors Without Borders shine. They do an amazing job mobilizing very quickly. We don't do recovery, but occasionally we partner with engineers like Engineers Without Borders to do recovery process to help bring in infrastructure, basic water sanitation, even connecting villages through bridge reconstruction. We don't even design. The primary goal of our designers is to work hand in hand with communities to give them the support and the expertise to rebuild their communities on sustainable prosperity. Now, that's a very key phrase because sustainability is very hot right now. There's all these conferences where everyone's greenwashing, they're coming in with these ideas that, that say, no, this is really green. Well, a 5,000 square foot home isn't so green. But when you're looking at sustainable prosperity, using the right materials, creating jobs out of reconstruction is an important framework to rebuild. I don't have time for this, but I just want to mention that how we work is hand in hand with that community. After a natural disaster, people always refer to those affected as victims. The moment that you start commenting that someone's a victim, you victimize them. They didn't cause this, it wasn't their fault. But if you work as a partner and as a client, you work equally. And so that you build strong relationships in that community and you're providing expertise to that community, you also break down barriers of ownership and participation. That's important because communities then own the buildings that are built and then it keeps the maintenance of those structures down. Now, this is a very new way of working. It's blurring the line between who is the client, who is the designer, does it really matter? I mean, we've got to the point that you might learn more from the client than you can ever learn from any book you read. And so we've always worked hand in hand with our clients this way. Some current works post tsunami reconstruction. Certainly our organization grew rapidly after the tsunami. When you're building after the tsunami or any natural disaster, this is the worst thing you could possibly do, which is you have some crazy idea that you hate to tell your colleagues about because they're going to think you're nuts. But because people need shelter, they'll ask for anything. And you think, ah, this is my one opportunity to get that giant pink blanc mange concrete structure and stick it on the beach in India and it's going to save people's lives. What you've done is you basically created an unreplicable experimental building that is not in keeping with the natural community, not in keeping with cultural and religious differences within that community. And this is a perfect bakery. If you want to get a large kind of, you know, pizza stick and put a fire in there, then you can create a great restaurant. It's not a home, it's blue, really hot. And also understanding context, we're very fortunate. We live in a first world situation. We complain about the quality of homes and so forth. But when you're dealing in areas where it's really a matter of survival, about putting a roof on your head, context is very important. This is housing built by the Indian government post Tsunami. No windows, no ventilation, all metal. 200 families were relocated into this, this camp. Within five days, they deserted it. Now, in architecture, we always question the level of success of a building. Now, if a community's been hit by seven successive 40 foot waves and then moves into your community and deserts it, you can call that a failure. But what's also happening in the NGO world, much like in post war reconstruction in Iraq and Afghanistan, is that these kind of no bid contracts or these large donor funding get subcontracted out layer after layer after layer. So you give your donation to a large ngo, they subcontract out to a national NGO who subcontracts out to a local group, who subcontracts out to some community groups. And they tell them, listen, we told our funders we will house 2,000 people in three weeks. You have to do that, otherwise you're not getting any money. There's a lot of admin costs that get lost along the way. And also quality control is just dropped automatically. So this is two very large US NGOs who built these homes. They have ventilation, there's not really windows. But you'll see the roofing material here is not a beautiful green metal roof, but actually asbestos. So here we are building homes that are not only affecting a community, but affecting their lives. In the Dalek community in South Asia, they decide to reject all these structures, go back to their home, found the original door of their original home, and they shared space with a tenant that was still upright in a house that was still upright with woven kajan. They built the house in less than a week. They integrated lighting by basically stealing it off the grid. So you've got power and you've got lighting. And most amazing of all, you'll see right here is a bathroom with toothpaste. Now, as you can tell by my accent, I'm English and you don't often toothpaste in an Englishman's house. So if you can get a bathroom up and operational that quickly, also when you have no support structure, you need to create financial resources. So they created a restaurant in less than two weeks. This is the best fish curry you'll ever taste in South India that evening, not so much the next morning. But it's incredible how self reliant people become when help does not come to their aid. So working with these communities, we provided not only design services but financial support to rebuild. Originally with funding. We're talking funding in the area of about 11 to $18,000. A community to build a community center and a kindergarten. By using the clients in the design process, in the construction process, we could expand the project with the same money to do play areas to do. For me, one of the most important things is to bring toilets and sanitation into the community. Women's cooperative skills training and a library. This is a design meeting. This is urban planning. This is GIS mapping. What you can do is you get kids in a room and you get them to plot out where their homes were. Because if you get parents in a room, they'll meet beforehand and they'll basically lie to you. They'll say oh no, no, no, I had a three bedroom house with a swimming pool, that's absolutely what I had. And they do that because they're trying to do best for their family. But if you put kids in a room and you close the doors and you say let's map out the town, within about five minutes they start dobbing on each other and they say no, no, he's lying, we only have one house. He was right there. And you could take Google Earth and overlay GIS mapping, it's almost identical. The only added bonus of this, unlike Google Maps, is we actually find out where the factories are and the fact the fumes are coming across and these are some of the environmental damage. Twice a week we do design review meetings. Here you see two licensed engineers, a LEED certified architect and an AIA architect. You don't know who they are. And that's the way it should be. The community gets very involved in that design process. But we also sign off on every single one of our drawings. We're profession and we need to act professionally. And by signing off on the drawings we are setting expectations in the community. This is what we're going to do. We adhere to local customs, religious beliefs and even village to village. There's cultural differences. So making sure that we build these buildings according to the way the village wants them Built and most importantly is starting small microeconomic businesses out of construction so that you're not just building a building, but you're providing skills training for carpentry, masonry, and you set in place businesses when you leave. And this is in less than two and a half months, this is built. It's completely off the grid, hybrid solar technology, rainwater collection system. And the other thing to note is we never put our donors names on any of our buildings. We don't believe in signage for two reasons. You know you donated to me, I know you donated to me. But you don't need to have your name on their building because it's their building. The moment you put your name on that building, it eradicates any ownership over that structure locally. And that when it breaks, they want to call you up personally and say, can you fix the lighting? Because your name is on this building. So it's very important that we don't do that very quickly. This is Susie Platt working with the un. We work with large organizations. The UN came to us. They had seen we had done a lot of school building in the east and said, we're having a lot of trouble building in this community. Could you help us? We came in with funding support. They didn't have the funding to do this. We came in with architects and they were so excited that it was the first time they would have a licensed architect work with them. They gave her her own office, which I love because this is Suzy. She's 29 years old, or she was when she arrived. And you can see the site. It's a beautiful place right by the jungle. The community welcomed her with open arms and the UN gave her her own office. Most importantly, is this the first time she had the word architect on the door for her name? Wow. This is rolling through by itself. Initial design concepts done by Susie. Integrating sustainable methods of natural ventilation, solar panels, and creating the trade winds into the community and then setting up the site. So you really create a community center that has everything the community wants. A kindergarten, community center, offices and started governance projects and so forth. I'm going to go back one. And then we have an IT center and a library and of course a cricket pitch because it's very important in Sri Lanka. I'll tell you why that was important in a second. I don't know what my computer is doing today, but it's decided to go on its own. Okay. We might skip through. Community meetings. Usually have about 100 to 200 people in. They each represent 10 people. So you're basically Sitting every week in front of a thousand people and starting community development corporations. So they bid on the construction of the project. And you can see we do construction drawings. These construction drawings are full, regular construction drawings in terms of elevations and all the details based off of the original design. Actually, I'm going to. Oh, look, there's a Google talk. I'm going to see what's going on here. Okay, maybe we're going to do this. We'll do this ghetto style. The other thing is that again, adhering to local customs, we always have a dog on site. For some reason, they name it after me because it's lazy and doesn't do anything, which I don't mind. Here's the skills training. Working with the community on everything from furniture construction to electricity to building. This is the buildings opening up a couple of months afterwards. This school building was built with hot chocolate sales from Atlanta, Georgia. What's interesting is that the rainwater is collected in these pots off of basically metal chains. They run down the metal chains into the pots into an underground rainwater collection system. The furniture and the windows were designed by the kids. It's right by the jungle. They take day trips into this jungle. It has the highest density of leopards anywhere in the world. It has a lot of elephants. I don't know what the health and safety and legal issues are with that, but it's something that they do. And they came back with drawings of the animals that they saw. And we integrated it into the design. Also, we started the first ever cricket tournament between Muslim, Tamil and Sinhalese communities. So you're not only building community, but you're bridging peace through construction. And this was an amazing tournament with thousands of people coming out. Okay, let's see if this goes back to this is the tsunami safer house. This is taking existing materials and budget of a house and. And redesigning it so that the water flows through the construction. You're not going to stop a tsunami, but you can stop the damage that happens with the force of the wave. And this design team created natural ventilation systems with four cores. And the four cores were important because they did engineering analysis on this and found that these cores can withstand five times the pressure of traditional constructions. This house is built for about $1,500 a home. As a result of this, this was replicated 500 times in Sri Lanka. This is a project to build a sports facility and HIV AIDS outreach center in South Africa. We did a design competition in an area where young women are infected with HIV between ages of 15 and 24, at a rate of 56%, they have no health care, they have no education. So it's important to set up a program that was kind of not this aggressive HIV AIDS outreach program, which is about scaring people, but creating a place where they can gather and it would be a safe space. And we decided to create a soccer field. There had never been a soccer field for a youth girls team in this area. And we put a sign up on a post that said, how many girls, if anyone, any girl, would like to be in a soccer league, please sign up. In less than seven days, we had 600 people sign up. What that showed is that there was a huge, huge interest in doing this, that the coaches of the girls team would be trained HIV AIDS medical professionals and they would provide care in that community. We did a design competition all online. All of our design competitions are online. That means that we get designs from all over the world. This is from Mexico, from Japan. The inflatable hemp house was from Japan. This is another one from Japan which is using FedEx boxes that you can ship materials over there and then you can plug them in to create the structure. I'm not really sure what they drink in Japan, but it makes them very creative also. The idea is that these units are economic forces. So in the daytime, it's a soccer field, and then in the evenings it turns into a marketplace using rammed earth construction and tires, recycled tires, to create a completely sustainable local structure. Again, creating a marketplace. And then at least these shading systems in front of the soccer fields, stands, they would pull down and you would project movies on them. So it becomes basically a community center in the evenings. We had nine finalists that were selected by this highbrow design committee and some of the community members. And then we did a traveling exhibit that went throughout the community. And the community chose the. The winner. This is the winner. It utilizes local materials, including sustainable wood from the forest nearby and rammed earth. It's sited within reach of all the schools. A very simple structure. And also that the trainings, the changing rooms double as an all purpose room because once you dropped the HIV AIDS rate in a community from 56% to, say, 25%, what have you done? You've made people live. Now what do they do? So thinking about the holistic program of if you're going to tackle AIDS now what? So doing skills training in that community so that these young women can get jobs once they leave school. All of our designers fly and work with their clients. This is Swee. He's from Singapore. He worked with the first ever girls team. The first thing we did was set up some gumpole sticks and you've got yourself a soccer field. Working with the site architects locally. And then the girls have been part of the design process and eventually coming up with a design which is the multipurpose room, a sales area so you can produce revenue for maintenance. And then this was kind of funny. They wanted a covered area that they could run through like a tunnel, like the professional World cup teams. Because they said, just because we're like some girls team from backwaters of Africa doesn't mean we don't get to have a tunnel. So designing a tunnel and the changing rooms and then of course, a connection point for a mobile health clinic. We're doing this in one area at the moment. We want to spread it to four different areas and then provide mobile health care throughout the community. That would provide health care to about 40,000 people, about 85% complete on funding. We're going to start construction next week. And then we're looking to build 20 facilities throughout Africa and replicate this model using the open source system we've got developed. I'm not going to go through this. This is a project we did in Grenada where we tried to ship the unit to Grenada. They went in two cargo point, they went out of two cargo ships. And unfortunately, the roofs arrived three weeks before. I mean, the walls arrived three weeks before the roofs. So we realized that shipping is not always an option. It was a good lesson to learn, but a great design. Completely recyclable material. It's $400 a structure. Don't have time for this. This is a medical center in Tanzania, is a site, 10 acres. The architect did a massing model to originally do a birthing station because a lot of women were dying because it was a 40 kilometer walk to the hospital. And so if there was any problems in pregnancy, either the woman or the child would die. The community said, you know, it's a very western thing of you to kind of come up with this kind of responsive solution. Instead of just, you know, creating a birthing center, why don't we create a medical training center so we can train midwives so that we can provide healthcare in our community. So we changed the program based on local needs and created this off the grid system using wind power and solar power. You can see the roofs are shaded so they can collect the rain. The Cooper Hewitt gave us some prize to be in the National Design Triennial and they gave us money to build a model of the design to show in the triennial. We cashed the money and we sent it to Tanzania to build a one to one scale model which we call the building. So again, fundraising, they got a little upset with that. So we actually did build them this cheap model. But you can see utilizing hybrid technologies, high tech and low tech working together to do a computer completely off the grid system. Not only provides rainwater collection to service the building, but irrigation of the village. The other thing to note is that this is the mayor and this is the guy who does the code. Officials, they're on the construction team. Also helps when they're building the building to get the approval through post Katrina reconstruction. I'm going to go through this so quickly, it's going to make your eyes blur. We found ourselves working after Hurricane Katrina, not because we were flying down there and we were wanting to get involved and we started appeals. By the time we had woken up after the next day, we had raised about $30,000. People were just sending us money saying, you've got to help, you've got to go down. So it was really our community and our donors who said, this is important that we do the sustainable long term reconstruction and we want to give you the funds so you can get involved. We did not focus our attention in New Orleans. Hurricane Katrina is like the Anderson Cooper disaster. Anywhere that Anderson went got funding. So we decided that we would go in areas that were neglected and overlooked. And we found ourselves in East Biloxi, Mississippi. This is our home. We slept in tents, in FEMA trailers, in people's houses. We had to identify buildings that were being destroyed and that meant almost every building. This is a typical home. And this is what many of the insurance company called a partially damaged home. Which would get you somewhere between 2,000 and $5,000 in insurance back for repairs. This is what we call a destroyed home. The other thing to note is that whilst we were on the ground trying to deal with issues from family to family, billions of dollars were spent on FEMA trailers with no plan for implementation. There was no infrastructure, there was no, no water, there was no power. As a result, thousands lay dormant in Arkansas while families lived in tents on the coast of the Gulf. So this is where design is political, is that when the community realizes that the federal or national state government officials can't provide the needs you need to support in a way that is positive but is proactive. So a ranigay group of people in East Biloxi got together and they were a real group. Everyone from city councilman to a ballet Teacher. This woman single handedly rescued 700 people on her own because she just felt the need to do it. And she stayed down there and she's been down there for the last two and a half years helping those families not only come back, but build their homes. We have architects and planners and translators. FEMA didn't provide any Vietnamese translators in an area with a high Vietnamese population. First generation, none of them. Not only did, hardly any of them know the storm was coming, but none of them got any federal assistance, so none of them got FEMA checks. So six months after Hurricane Katrina, they were in lean tos next to their houses. They didn't even have FEMA trailers. We also found Salvador Dali who's been an amazing architect. So the idea is instead of all of us fighting for the same dollar, we would coordinate together under one center and as a team we would collaborate on fundraising. And this ragtag group got together and as a result brought in millions of dollars for the reconstruction of New Orleans. I mean of East Biloxi. Around 50% of the homes were destroyed, about 50% were flooded and could be repaired. This is what a repairable home looks like. You can see the mold remediation. Every black spot is mold. You can see, see the difference in race. It was a very racially diverse community, but also a very poor community. Pre Katrina, more than 30% were living on less than $15,000 a year. So you're talking about historic precedent of poverty and neglect. When we arrived, 3,000 homes were destroyed and less than 5% of people were in FEMA trailers. There was no Internet access, no office and no staff for the coordination. We borrowed stuff from a church, we stole WI fi from the Salvation army. And a couple of years later we find ourselves in the completion of over 500 rehabilitated homes and 17 new buildings. So how did this happen? First, communities didn't want to know about billion dollar plans. They just wanted to know how could they get access to $20,000 to rebuild their home. Everybody was offering money. Fema was offering $26,000. But by the time you had done your rental assistance, you only had 15 left. SBA loans was almost quarter of a million dollars. But you had to have your home as collateral and you had to have good credit. Many of these community members had inherited their homes from their family and as a result didn't have insurance because they didn't have a mortgage. So they not only had no security, but basically by owning their home and owning their land, they lost everything. Even the Mississippi Grants program said that you can get funding, but only if you were outside the floodplain and you had homeowners insurance. You can't get insurance if you can't have mortgages. But we found that There were over 200 groups, both faith based and just the do gooders. The people who really just wanted to get involved and they had 5,000 bucks or 50,000 bucks. Salvation army had materials and the Home Depot came in with millions of dollars worth of tools. So we said, let's bring all these people under one tent because everyone wanted to be the last to give. And as a result, by creating a coordination program, we could do $20,000 for rehabs and 115,000 for new construction and a low barrier, credit and background checks, but also making sure that these are sustainable construction methodologies so that we met and exceeded building codes. Also, there was no labor. This was our general contractors. Any general contractor that had done any work in the Gulf coast was snapped up by big ticket projects. You couldn't find a contractor for less than $80,000 a person because everybody wanted them to do infrastructure. So these were our contractors. What you see here is basically the faces of over 3,000 volunteers who streamed into East Biloxi because they felt the need to get involved. And as a result, we've been able to coordinate with over 200 groups. And this list goes on and on and on. I don't even have room for it, but we had everyone from the Amish to Islamic Relief to the Mormons. I mean, if all these people can work together, you can almost get anything done. Oh, the other thing to note is we have people from Burning man, which was really cool as well. They all wanted to be in geodesic domes and like chill out. But bringing out design students. Hundreds of architecture and design students came down to map the community. Not only to figure out how to rebuild their homes, but to coordinate and to put each of these groups in a different segment to do initial surveys of buildings. We surveyed over 3,000 buildings in the time that it took the national association of Architects to do four buildings. So it's talking about immense amount of work just through volunteer labor and coordination, doing flood advisory maps. We would download these 70 page FEMA documents and then translate them into simple graphics so people could understand. It got to the point where local FEMA officials were wanting maps from us because. Because they couldn't even understand their own documents. So it was pretty amazing that by funding a local community group and local designers, we were able to do simple things such as put up signage. And while this was going on. As I mentioned, these large planning exercises were going on, but there were these huge plans. And as you can see here, this is the mainly African American community right here. These are the casinos right here. And then right there is what they called Central Park. Now, this Central park is twice the size of the Central park in New York City. Why does a place like East Biloxi need something the size of Central Park? Because it looked like nobody was living there. But again, the Vietnamese community was not incorporated into the survey system they had done. And they just thought it was empty land. This actually was all the Vietnamese community. And according to their plan, they were just going to displace all the Vietnamese. So when you present this plan to a community, it not only creates a lot of tension, but one of the ethnic groups is going to go, wait a minute, how come all of our homes are disappeared? So it was important really to understand the context of the community, be on the ground. And this is what our community groups were doing. And all of our design is going house to house, talking to residents and finding out what are the basic things they need to do to rebuild. How do they rebuild? They could rebuild their home at the same level if they didn't need funding. But if they wanted funding, they had to elevate their homes, which would mean an extra $25,000 funding cost. So figuring out that financial burden, what people wanted in their community, not only just for their home, but the community as a whole. As you can see, the most important things were affordable housing, a sense of community and jobs. They also wanted schools and amenities for children. And very low down on the group, you've got entertainment and casinos. So the people who lived in the community were less concerned about this ring of casinos and more concerned about schools and community centers. So that's what we did. Safety and construction help. We came down to East Biloxi and you would find 20 Episcopalians on a roof, all desperately trying to rebuild it. Now, I've not met a lot of skinny Episcopalians, but even wafer thin ones, that roof will collapse. Right? So what we were doing, we're like pulling people off roofs, saying, no, you, you weigh 4,000 pounds. This building just got hit by a hurricane. You're all going to die. Right? There is no divine intervention here. You just need to get off the building. So doing that, skills training. And this is an amazing photo because the community group who was in this house found a lockbox with $10,000 of cash in it. And they didn't keep that money. They gave it to the family. And that was an anchor to allow that family to rebuild. But also I brought down a bunch of students from Mississippi, I mean from Minnesota, to come down to Biloxi in the summer and to Demold Buildings. Now going from northern Minnesota to Biloxi, Mississippi in the middle of the summer. Not only is it hotter than Hades in Biloxi, but the mosquitoes carry baseball bats. They sting you and then they whack you and you're like, ow. And so for them, it was a real culture shock. Unfortunately for one of the designers, these Tyvek suits, which you need to protect yourself from the mold, were really hot and sweaty. And he took off all his clothes before putting it on, not knowing it was see through. He had a very long day. But also our designers, our construction officials have been working with all the community groups. Mike's building Funtime. This is Mike Grody. He's been working down on the coast for almost a year, teaching and training local communities, rehabbing. So this is a typical home with $20,000 of construction. A destroyed home gets a community group and a building crew and this is what it becomes. That's not bad for $20,000. The interiors. Okay, so they're not going to be on the front cover of the Architectural Record. The New York Times is not going to write about this home as if it was the best thing since sliced bread. But, you know, in Mountain View, this will probably go for half a million dollars. Oh, yes, more than that. There is a dishwasher, new construction. And these are newly constructed buildings that are raised and elevated. You look at the ADA ramps. There was no funding set aside for ADA ramps, which meant that, you know, people had to move out if they had any disabilities. By adding that extra financing, we could bring that into the community. Is this. Yeah, this is Cora's. So that home that you saw that was partially damaged, this is her new home. Also, we decided to come up with a program which is $115,000 single family housing that would meet and exceed FEMA guidelines, integrate disaster mitigation, and use sustainable materials and construction methods. We weren't being sustainable because Al Gore told us to. We were being sustainable because we want to create the utilities bills low enough so that that family can afford higher insurance rates. So it's being green for protection. We were very fortunate that we had a couple of large funders, in particular Obrist Angel Network. I guess this is being recorded, but I can say this. It's actually nice when you have an independent funder and you don't have to adhere to too many federal restrictions. And then a whole group of people who came together to choose basically 12 firms that represented the best of the area that could come up with these single family homes for $115,000. So these designers came down, they presented their ideas to the community in Biloxi. Hundreds of people came out, TV, radio, just to see these designs. About 20 minutes before we opened the doors, we sat down the architects and said, for the last month we've been doing a family selection process and over 200 families have been vetted and seven of them are going to get a new home, fully funded, with an architect, but they get to choose who they work with. And this weekend isn't about you presenting to the community. It's about them choosing the architect they want to work with. These guys sweated bullets all day because seven members of that community, of that group were people who were going to choose them. And I told them, there are 12 of you here. You know, seven of you are going to get a fee, we're going to pay you, and four of you are going to go home with no money. So basically, they sweated bullets to get the community to work with them. And seven homes were selected. And they're quite modern homes. Because what's interesting is once you elevate these homes 1012ft in the air, the traditional shotgun begins to look weird. You have this giant pole and then this little shotgun on top of it. So this was chosen by residents. These are families that are living on less than $15,000 a year, that probably never met an architect before. And they went for the most radical designs using SIPs panels, solar, wind, Just amazing group. This is the porch dog, which I showed video of at the start. And Richard Tyler, who's a painter and I can't do a southern accent, but he's like, he was funny. We said, why did you choose the porch dog? He goes, you know what, it's an ugly house, but I love it. It's my porch dog. So it was just the idea that he had chosen it. It's his house and it's going to going to get built. The nice thing about this is with every porch dog, you get a dog for your porch. But also building these homes that are pragmatic, and we get that amazing moment where we get to go in the FEMA trailer and say, you get in a house, right? It's just an incredible emotional moment to have everyone come in and say, guess what? We're good to go. The downside in that is that these Clients live in a FEMA trailer on site. They wake up at six in the morning and they see nothing happening and they'll be like, excuse me, you know, my six kids and I are in a femur trailer and we have no bathroom. Would you mind, you know, building? So we had a client that was destined to make sure that we worked hard. And so this is Ms. Parker. She's a single mom with six kids. She works in Keesler Air Force Base for full time. While she was trying to get this rebuilt, she wasn't going to move. This is her home for years and she's definitely not going to get out of here. Unfortunately, we had to destroy her vegetable garden. So what does it mean? Week one, week two, week three, week four, week five, week six, week seven, week eight. And in nine weeks a house is built for less than $115,000. Now these are beautiful homes. I mean, we're not talking about your like, you know, moth eaten rentals down here in Silicon Valley. We're talking about brand new, gorgeous homes. And of course someone who's very happy it's hers. I mean she's absolutely ecstatic that she's in her home. This is the trans, the Vietnamese community living down by the bayou had to be 12ft elevated. And the interesting thing is we didn't have the funding to do flooring and the structure. So the designer built the flooring as the structure diagonal tongue and groove system that interconnects, that connects the beams together and you just polish the floor and there you've got a house for less than $65 a square foot. Not bad for a family with four kids who are desperate to leave. And funnily enough, this was our only battle is that we really wanted to keep this tree and they wanted to tear it down. But we won and we were very happy about that. We have no time for this. We did parks. This is a former crack park, which is now a community park. This is a one stop center for anyone in East Biloxi can walk in here and get financial services, design services and any management needed to rebuild. When we arrived, less than 14% of the community were in their houses. Right now about 37 is under repair and about 15 is completed. What that means is without any publicity, without any national exposure, this community has got together and rebuilt 48% of their community. They didn't need big concerts, they didn't need super celebrities coming in to show that they needed help. They just got together and did it. And so this is really the shining light in the post tsunami, post Katrina reconstruction. Just one note. The New York Times did do a piece once we started completing these buildings and the same day this guy showed up. So this ragtag group has also been joined by someone else. We're going to put him on, on some roofing stuff. No time for this. This is the Mardi Gras Indians. These are all beautiful buildings. I get very excited showing these. But in the next six minutes, I'm going to show you the fact that this isn't enough. We've done this for eight years, right? I started off as a student with a goal. Let's try and change a few communities. But we're screwed. I mean, no matter how much I do over the course of my life, I will never make an impact in the globe. Never ever. That's just a fact. Why? Because a billion people live in abject poverty. And 4 billion people live in growing but becoming stable economies. These are people living on two to six dollars a day. What's interesting is in the slums, the favelas, the unplanned settlements and the refugee camps, when these community members get money, they spend it on three Education for their kids, health care for their family, or improving their living standards. Which means there's a multi billion dollar economy every day in the improvement of housing. And no one's tapped into this and they're doing the same mistakes again and again and again. So even if you had no like goodness in your body, right? You could be the do all evil, right? You could make a ton of money just doing this, right? So what I'm saying is like we have an opportunity as well as a responsibility to, to build better housing. Because as we heard earlier, one in seven people live in these areas. But in the next 20 years, with the global population boom, it's going to be one in three. So we're not looking at a better world. We're looking at a world where one in three people will be living in areas like this in the time that I hit 50. So 20 years from now, we will build every structure on the planet in the history of time again, we're going to double the number of structures on the planet. Planet. And like I say, most of those structures will be in Mumbai, not in Mountain View. But fortunately, there's an amazing group of people all over the world. And over the course of eight years, we've begun to find these groups from Detroit to Kosovo to Afghanistan, Kenya, East Timor. This is a peace center in East Timor. This is a school in Burkina Faso. This is a chapel in Alabama using the windscreens of a Chevy Capri. It cost them $100 to buy all these windscreens. They interconnected them. It's better than any Frank Gehry building you'll find and cost less than $30,000. I think a Frank Gehry bathroom costs $30,000. This is the environmental center up on the Turtle Mountain reservation using straw bale construction. This is all from materials within a 50 mile radius. This is the camel clinic. It has a solar panel on the back. The camel has the clinic attached to it. It goes from village to village. While it goes from one village to another. The solar panel generates enough energy to run the clinic at the next village. So it's a self powered camel clinic. This is elementary school. This is residential. This is the Guardians Institute. This is low income housing in Chile, Urban acupuncture in Brazil, Latrines and Ladakh. This is the best toilet you'll ever use in the world. The prevailing winds from the Himalayan mountains come in and create this cool breeze. And because of this black material creates a solar flue. So all the flies and all the dirt and all the disease gets shot out the top and then you get a gentle breeze underneath. Play pump. Kids go around. They pull up water up to the cistern. As the kids play, it generates enough water to irrigate the village. 400 of these were built in the last two years. Many kids and women have chronic back problems in the developing world because they have to carry water every morning. Flip it on its side, stick a handle. You've got a hippo roller. A bridge that submerses because of the Three Gorges Dam. Sandbag shelters that were developed for lunar landings in Mars. This was supposed to be for housing people once they got to Mars. I know Google's involved in some lunar thing. You might want to use this. But this guy realized that we weren't going to get to Mars in time. So he reappropriated this for refugees in Iran. Built structures for less than it cost to build a tent. Geodesic domes. Illiterate villagers from Rajasthan found a book on Buckminster Fuller, said we could do this. They built geodesic domes using recycled farming materials and chicken wire. Okay, so in the next two minutes. So architectural revolution. This was a phrase coined by Lecobuzzi in 1923 as a result of the housing crisis in France after World War I. As you can see here, we've got a massive housing crisis going on right now. And it's not in the high profile cities of New York and And Chicago, but in Lagos and Chennai. So we need to change the way we build and we need to change the way we share. We need to improve the living standards of 5 billion people and to do it with millions of solutions and millions of inventors. And I've showed you some of the ideas, whether it be open source, localized, adaptable, using appropriate materials, appropriate technologies, alternate energy. Two years ago I won the TED Prize. I didn't know what it was. I showed up, they said, you've got 22 minutes to explain to a room that you want to make a wish to change the world and they'll make you do it. I didn't know anyone at this conference, I didn't know anything about it, but apparently they were important. Now the guy who was sleeping actually hasn't helped me yet, so, you know, I'll have to do it again for him. So I said, let's create a network that will encourage and support innovators. Sustainable solutions for 5 billion people. And a group got together from Sun Hot Ted, AMD and Creative Commons to create a system that will allow designers to get online, share their ideas, find solutions and project manage things in the field. And right now we're working with Autodesk to be the first people to put in CAD drawings live rendered online that you can comment and work virtually with Anyone, not just 2D but 3 3D and so you can work globally. File storage, we've got something like six terabytes of storage in Sunnyvale, which is like some of the Internet people finder. And also a challenge is that it's not only about putting proven solutions and failures up, but to challenge people to come up with solutions. So as mentioned, we have a design competition that launched a couple of weeks ago to design appropriate technology for facilities in the developing world. And those challenges, the winner of that challenge will be built with funding from amd. Again, my computer is dying. So it's a chocolate cooperative in Ecuador connecting villages throughout the Amazon so they can do fair trade chocolate sales and production and using technology to bring in resources into the community. This is a for profit enterprise and the funding will be done to conserve the Amazon. So this is locals protecting local interests. This is in Kenya. This is slum dwellers in an area of 250,000 people. This is their clinic, this is their community center. And it's to create a technology center that's not just about training people, but to giving the youth the access to media so they can create websites. Last week they just created a radio station called 99.9 Ghetto FM. So it's also doing a recording studio. This is in Nepal, an area where there's one doctor in the entire region of close to 300,000 people. A telemedicine center that will connect this community to first class physicians and medical professionals around the world. So here we are. I'm back ghetto style again. And as you can see, I'm right on the number. So I know people are getting stressed. So where are we? We're in the situation where as a design profession, you can spend your entire life getting that elusive client that will allow you to build an $800 million building in Dubai using questionable labor laws, or you can do something that improves the lives of people and betters the world. And looking at this selfishly, I could either become Zah hadid and have 50 clients who can afford my services, or I can stay in the sphere that I'm in. And I have 5 billion clients. Now they may not be able to pay large sums of money for my services, but collectively, through an open source mechanism, I actually not only could make more money than Zaha, but I actually can make a hell of more of an impact than she will ever make in her life. And I'm not picking on her because she's a star architect, but she certainly, her name gets banded about as one of the top ones. And so all I'm asking is that whether you're a tech designer and you want to do something open source or a real designer doing architecture and design, is that you give a damn. So thank you very much. Thank you.

Thanks a lot, Cameron.

Okay, thank you. Just quick mention, you can actually donate one day of your salary like Chris Sacker and Jason Schellen did before he jumped ship. And that basically runs our organization for the day. Offer your services. We're looking for PHP people and Drupal people. So if you know how to use the Internet, that would be awesome. You can just get a hold of me. My email's here. I'm on Skype, I'm on Facebook. If you can't find me, you shouldn't be working here. Thank you.