Open Source House: designing eco-affordable housing together

The design competition starts on January 15th, 2010 and is open for team or individual participation. The challenge is to design a sustainable, flexible and locally embedded one family house for a specific location in Ghana. The modular construction should be suitable for local implementation and affordable for its future owners. The winning design(s) will be built in Ghana. All information regarding the competition will be published on our website on January 15th.

1. Sign up
The first step is to sign up for the competition. By doing so, you’ll automatically become a platform member and will be kept up to date with the latest news regarding the Design Competition, the research findings and activities like interactive sessions, activities in congresses and universities, etc.

2. Become an active member
Fill out your profile and share your ideas. Contact and co-creation with local parties is promoted and facilitated by the platform. It also provides the possibility to chat, share ideas and to team-up. Once the competition starts the platform also offers the possibility of a private space, to exchange information and designs with the rest of your team.
To extend your personal (international) network, for personal PR and to team-up, one can add one’s portfolio, website and expertise to their profile.

3.  Start competition 15th January
The design competition starts January 15th, 2010. Participants all over the world are challenged to design a house for a family in coastal region, Ghana. The basis for designing is a framework of 8 OS-House principles in which houses and specific elements can be designed, developed and implemented. Some of the judging criteria are: How strong are the 8 principles implemented in the design? How feasible is the design? How well is the structure embedded in the urban context?
OS-House conducted research in Ghana to get a better understanding of Ghana’s housing situation. These research findings contain essential information that will help you create a design with higher social, technical and economic viability.

The full Competition Case and further detailed information and research findings will be published on the 15th of January on the OS-House platform.

4. Deadline and submission format.
May 17th, 2010. Before this date all designs must be submitted digitally. The design case, which will be published on the 15th of January, describes the format and drawings to be delivered. Contestants are asked to deliver designs considering all house components -foundation, structure, floor, facade, roof- and its set of connections.

5. Pilot
The winning design(s) will be built in a pilot project in Ghana, to test the technical and economic feasibility as well as the social perception. Joining the competition is your chance to establish your name as an architect while witnessing your design being built and used by its new residents.

6. The Open Source phase
To generate content for the OS-House platform we start with the Ghana design competition. However the aim of OS-House is to provide knowledge and choice. Therefore all submitted designs are published on the OS-House platform after the competition.
After this first competition and pilot project OS-House will continue to promote the implementation of more OS-Houses, challenge platform members to improve available designs, organize new competitions and stimulate local parties to take designs and adapt them to their local conditions. Our goal is to realize a 100.000 OS-Houses before the year 2020.

www.os-house.org