Hasta La Ideas

Last month we mentioned Open Source Ecology’s Global Village Construction Set, an extremely ambitious project to bring industrial tools to areas that cannot afford them. We were thrilled to learn they’ve been selected as a Semi-Finalist in the Buckminster Fuller Challenge.

To refresh your memory, the GVCS team has narrowed down thousands of industrial machines and initially determined that a society “with modern comforts” can be built with 40 different machines. (It’s been upgraded to 50 since our original post on them.) They then began designing prototypes of these machines, using an open-source methodology which led them to discover they could produce the machines at just 1/8th the cost of what they’d go for if purchased directly from a supplier. Also helping to keep the costs down is the Lego factor, whereby as many interchangeable parts, modules and motors as possible are integrated into the designs.

Obviously they’re not looking to build car factory paint-spraying machines, but things that are more practical. Their Compressed Earth Brick Press machine, for instance, is designed for users to dump local dirt into a hopper at the top, and it then spits bricks out of the bottom at a rate of 16 per minute. Other machines in the pipeline are a sawmill, an induction furnace, a steam generator and a backhoe.

We love the ethos of Open Source Ecology founder Marcin Jakubowski:

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