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Population growth - Housing issues - Questions

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Population growth - Housing issues - Questions

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1. What are the causes of population displacement?
2. How do people use interior spaces? What are the basic functions that interior spaces need to provide?
3. How can we design spaces to be multifunctional and to efficiently use space?
4. How can we design buildings to be cost and energy efficient?

Reference
STEM Stage 5 | Science, Graphics Technology, Industrial Technology Engineering, Mathematics | Tiny House DOC

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Organized curriculum in four parts: designing a tiny house, learning from experts, researching a related subtopic, and doing collaborative work.

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The Tiny House Movement, a growing trend of home-builders and companies building houses under 400 square feet, caught my attention as a strong generative topic for an Advanced Drawing and Design class of 10th-, 11th-, and 12th-graders. The topic seemed both aspirational from an ecological point of view and concrete from a design and engineering perspective. The range of teaching possibilities allowed for innovative and challenging curriculum design as students would be tasked with understanding and practicing basic architecture as well as considering related thought-provoking content. Students would discover the factors contributing to the movement, such as economic pressures and the appeal of the DIY (do-it-yourself) movement.

I organized the curriculum in four parts: designing a tiny house, learning from experts, researching a related subtopic, and doing collaborative work. These four parts were woven together throughout a semester in which students met for two 80-minute and one 50-minute class each week. For instance, students would work for three to four consecutive classes on designing their tiny house; then they would jump to a class on researching their subtopic or learning from an expert; and, finally, they would return to their designing. Once all the individual houses were designed, students would begin work on one of two projects: preparing for an all-school assembly or building a model tiny home. Afterward, I would reflect and ask students to give feedback to understand how this extended unit could be improved in the future.

Here's what we did and how we did it.

Designing a Tiny House

Students got to explore the design process architects use by designing individual tiny houses. They actually experienced conceptual design, schematic design (SD), and design development (DD). Visiting architects exposed them to construction documentation (CD) and construction administration (CA) phases that were too complicated for our scope.

During the design process, students got to imagine their tiny house as an expression of "their story," a backbone of concept design. They got to ask themselves what underlying ideas were going to drive their design. Some were drawn to location as an inspiration for their house's look, while others were inspired by materials and artful expression. From a food truck home to a surf shack to a dynamic, expressive tiny home with unusual angles and materials, all students had to have some driving concept and story behind their design. And they had to describe it in their sketchbook.

For those struggling to grasp concept design, looking at pictures of Frank Lloyd Wright's Falling Water house and several Zaha Hadid buildings for homework helped them understand how famous architects use ideas, points of view, and story to drive their projects.

During the schematic design (SD) phase, students learned how to rough out their layouts with bubble drawings and by using low-resolution balsa-wood models. Bubble drawings are loose sketches that assign general uses to areas within a design's overall footprint. Students circled areas (visual "bubbles") for entry, kitchen area, bathroom, bedroom or sleeping loft, and dining or office areas. This stage of the design process gets the ball rolling without the time-consuming aspects of actually laying down ideas on graph paper or with detail. Students began to understand how design flows from the general to the specific and how, in order to finalize a design, there is a great deal of roughing out ideas, seeking feedback, and revising. Then, working in pairs and asking for feedback, students saw how the assigned spaces (bubbles on the drawing) appeared to a classmate, got feedback, and problem-solved if the layout seemed awkward or not fully optimized.

On graph paper in ½ inch = 1 foot scale, students were responsible for creating an accurate floor plan and elevation drawing during the design development (DD) phase. Working in CAD (computer-aided design) was optional. Two students chose to design their tiny houses in Google's free design software, SketchUp.

In order to envision tiny living, students walked around campus with tape measures, measuring offices and smaller spaces to get a sense of scale. They also thought about airplanes, boats, and other confined spaces to consider designing for efficiency. An article on what architects have learned from studying slums was also enlightening. In "Slums as a Model for Future Projects," the author noted that slums may appear chaotic but have underlying structures that can be informative to architects. ¹

Learning from Experts

Hearing from architects, exhibit designers, engineers, and research specialists gave students insights into related fields. These experts provided concrete instruction on the design phases above, as well as ideas for how to think about arranging a model house to share with our community. Visiting engineers introduced students to sustainability design, permaculture, and geothermal systems. Permaculture was a new concept to me and to the students. We began to understand the term as meaning "conscious design that integrates ecology, geography, architecture, and appropriate technologies for sustainability." Our on-site research specialist provided tips for subtopic inquiries, such as exploring Twitter and databases. Having these experts to round out instruction and give students a sense of connectivity to career paths was inspiring. Two exhibition design experts gave students more insight into how information can be thoughtfully and dynamically displayed to engage audiences.

Group Work

Collaboration is essential to all design fields and therefore needed to be a featured aspect of the curriculum. Students collaborated on two products, a group presentation for an all- school assembly and a prototype model of a tiny house for our school community to explore. These two products required students to work together sharing ideas, organizing and selecting content, and building. Two groups were created; the students got to select whether they would work with the assembly preparation group or the model tiny house group.

Assembly preparation required three iterations of slides and speaking points. Students would let their group peers know whether a slide was confusing or lacked aesthetic appeal; then students would revise and give the presentations again a few classes later, reassessing the flow of information, clarity, and time allotted to each presenter and topic. For instance, how much time should be designated for an overview of tiny living, how much time for each slide, and how many subtopics should be presented? Students broke the movement down to five talking points: size, self-reliance/DIY, economic factors, environmental benefits, and legal issues. Each talking point would be on one slide. The students selected homelessness, solar energy, and food trucks as the subtopics to cover in the assembly. (I maintained a guide-on-the-side position for all these decisions.)
The group that chose to build the model tiny house began with lots of discussion and sketching. This process, like figuring out the assembly content, was iterative and involved the group in collaborating on initial concepts for the model and getting inspiration from our visiting exhibit designers. The designers posed the idea of using the model to showcase work from the class, like each student's tiny house floor plan and subtopic research. They encouraged the students to be aspirational by posing questions for the school community, such as "What can you live without?"

But because of poor time management, by the time the students had agreed on a general design direction, we were faced with time constraints. As a result, we had to consider efficiencies like building in cardboard or scaling down the model. In the end, students were able to use our theater flats, taken down from a recent play, and reconfigure them into freestanding corners of a 13-foot-by-8-foot model tiny house.
Tables were covered in brown paper and kitchen objects like a coffee pot and utensils were place on top.
A chair and taped-off areas were arranged to represent a bathroom.

A sleeping loft was indicated by blue tape; a closet was mocked up by hanging clothing from the lost-and-found. Another teacher volunteered to drill together the theater flats with the help of students. Students hung up their floor plans, displayed their low-resolution balsa-wood models and some of their subtopic research, and created an area for comments and feedback from the community. The model was up for 48 hours in our courtyard and had to be presented between long periods of rain.

Researching and Learning about a Related Topic

As a generative topic, the tiny house movement inspires inquiry and research, and I tasked students with exploring a related subtopic. Students needed to brainstorm possible topics before choosing one. We followed brainstorming tips, such as deferring judgment at first, going for quantity, encouraging wild ideas, allowing each person to speak, and letting the brainstorm be visual. Expected topics like environmentalism, economics, and solar energy were generated in addition to less obvious ones like food trucks, bioluminescence, and homelessness.

Students learned about their subtopic in order to hold confident conversations with me and with their peers. They had to write a three- to seven-page paper and present seven sources. They spent time exploring online tools like Twitter for research. Subtopic research varied, but generally students submitted five to eight pages with text and images and held three- to five-minute conversations with me. In the end, the group organizing the assembly curated the subtopics and selected three to be presented.

Outcomes and Lessons Learned

Overall, as a first iteration of this curriculum design, I am satisfied with our experience. The assembly went well, and many in our school community visited and enjoyed the tiny house model.

By diving deeply into ambitious curriculum design, I was able to learn a lot even while enduring a certain amount of chaos. Creating curriculum and content essentially from scratch, I felt that it was a mostly healthy chaos that occurs when people have to figure things out as they go. I am grateful for the rich local community from which we were able to draw our visiting experts and for the willingness of my students to jump into the semester, knowing this would be a first pass at a new curriculum. Half the students provided feedback that they would have preferred the curriculum to be arranged in the following order: design tiny house, research subtopic, learn from experts, do group work. The other half responded that they enjoyed the weaving of the components throughout the semester.

Students were also asked to rank the four components in terms of how valuable their learning was from each one. Half of the students chose researching their subtopic as their most valuable learning, while more than a third (36 percent) chose designing their tiny house. I was slightly surprised by this and wondered if the half that chose their subtopic as most valuable were simply more passionate and connected to their chosen topic.

While I am tempted to move on to a new generative topic next fall for a new class, I am going to resist the attraction of novelty and repeat the Tiny House Project. Certainly, I will be better equipped to structure the class with confidence and to push for even deeper connectivity to our world now that I have this first pass under my belt. Themes like global housing and sanitation conditions, building materials and the concept of permaculture were touched on superficially this year. I hope that I can deliver a more efficient and deeper curriculum next time around.

Notes

1. Anna Popova, "Slums as a Model for Future Projects," Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia, Barcelona, Spain, p. 4; online at https://d.docs.live.net/9ab1f1ca57923621/Documents/NAIS/Independent%20Teacher%2010.31.16/The%20Tiny%20Housefall2016final.docx_APresponses.docx.
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The Tiny House Movement, a growing trend of home-builders and companies building houses under 400 square feet, caught my attention as a strong generative topic for an Advanced Drawing and Design class of 10th-, 11th-, and 12th-graders. The topic seemed both aspirational from an ecological point of view and concrete from a design and engineering perspective.

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Rent to own your own tiny house - solar power so no more bills either. Here are some pictures of our tiny house builds and other designs to choose from.

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This is amazing! I think it's made out of cardboard boxes with the tubes glued on top, but I love it. | do it with cardboard | Pinterest | Cardboard boxes, Log cabins and Box

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This is amazing! I think it's made out of cardboard boxes with the tubes glued on top, but I love it.

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Freddy the Fish Teaches About Stormwater

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Freddy the Fish Teaches About Stormwater

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Water pollution | Water Contamination | Video for kids

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Plastic Bag Grab challenge : The Lifecycle of a Plastic Bag

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Plastic Bag Grab challenge : The Lifecycle of a Plastic Bag

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Video

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Plastic Bag Grab challenge : The Lifecycle of a Plastic Bag

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Making a plastic bag

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The World's Largest Lesson - Our Work - Past Projects - Think Global

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Think Global created a bank of teaching resources around the Sustainable Development Goals which helped teachers deliver The World's Largest Lesson.

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What is the world eating?

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Peter Menzel and Faith D'Aluisio traveled the world documenting that most basic of human behaviors -- what we eat.

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Stopping at a favorite café for a caffeine fix is a morning ritual for plenty of people, and most of us toss the disposable paper or polystyrene cup into the garbage once we've downed enough coffee to wake us up. You might not give that cup a second thought all day, not even if you're the one taking out the trash. But your awareness of just how much waste is generated by those cups-and everything else you eat or use all day-might increase if you had to wear it for a month.

Not ready to take that fashion plunge? No worries-activist Rob Greenfield is doing it for us. Since Sept. 19, he's been roaming the streets of New York City wearing every single piece of rubbish he creates as part of his project, Trash Me.

Greenfield, who has previously biked across the United States eating only from Dumpsters to raise awareness of food waste, told TakePart that he wanted to come up with a visual way to get people thinking about how much trash they create.

"The whole idea is that garbage is out of sight, out of mind. We put it in the garbage can. The garbage truck comes and picks it up weekly, and we never really have to think about it ever again," Greenfield said. Even if people have seen pictures of landfills or read about the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, "the problem is that people don't see their responsibility for that. They don't think they're part of that."

The production and disposal of the packaging on an item as seemingly innocuous as a bag of potato chips has deep implications for the environment, Greenfield said. "That bag might last for five minutes of eating-five minutes of enjoyment. But the thing about it is, to get that plastic packaging to you, that meant that there had to be mining of virgin materials from the Earth. That had to be shipped around the world, created in a manufacturing center-all of that taking fossil fuels, electricity, and emitting greenhouse gases and pollution."

Then, once you eat the chips, the packaging "goes to either the landfill or the ocean. To get it to the landfill, garbage trucks need to drive around using fossil fuels; those trucks get three miles to the gallon," Greenfield said. "Once it gets to the landfill, its life isn't over. It's going to live for about 500 years. Or possibly eternity."

RELATED: NASA Video Reveals How 35 Years of Trash Turned Into Ocean Garbage Patches

As seen in the video above, Greenfield's suit of clear trash bags has compartments that hold all the refuse. He rinses items or triple bags them to avoid smelling like a walking garbage bin, and he only wears the suit when he's out in public. "Originally my plan was to wear it for every waking moment. But I just realized that I think that would've been unbearable, and I might've seriously injured myself," he said. On Tuesday, day nine, the sheer bulk of the rubbish-everything from coffee cups, food packaging, and paper and plastic bags-began making it tough for him to get through subway turnstiles.

"I know the statistic is out there that the average American creates nearly four-and-a-half pounds of trash per day. So I knew that it would quickly become a lot of trash," Greenfield said. "But the thing was, I just thought at the beginning that it would be one or two little garbage bags hanging around my neck. I didn't realize how quickly it would add up just doing normal things. I'm already having a hard time fitting through doors, and just getting home last night was a bit of a challenge. So I know it's going to get a lot harder."

From Times Square to Central Park, people on the streets of Gotham are eager to take selfies with Greenfield. "Everywhere I go, people are laughing and smiling, and everybody's stopping to take pictures," he said. That gives him a chance to talk about why he's wearing garbage. But the average passerby might not "realize what I'm doing is just wearing my trash and showing people how much one person makes. So the challenge is communicating that. But as far as people's reactions go, they've been great. They don't always know exactly what I'm doing, but they know that I'm trying to make a statement about trash."

If there's anybody else out there who wants to wear their trash, given how tough it is to get around in the suit, Greenfield suggested sticking with a shorter time frame. "A day or a week at the most," he said. "But it would be a way to really get you to be conscious of how much trash you're making."

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See the Guy Wearing 30 Days' Worth of Garbage Around NYC

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Stopping at a favorite café for a caffeine fix is a morning ritual for plenty of people, and most of us toss the disposable paper or polystyrene cup into the garbage once we've downed enough coffee to wake us up.

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This guy's outfit is totally trash-y!

Environmental activist Rob Greenfield is collecting every single piece of garbage he generates in a month ― from his morning coffee cup to his grocery bag ― and wearing it.

By walking down the street donning huge bags of trash, Greenfield's goal is to get people to open their eyes to how much waste a person generates in daily life and how it harms the environment.

"My main focus is trying to educate and inspire people to make less trash," Greenfield told The Huffington Post. "Some people have zero idea. For them, once they toss something, it's totally out of sight, out of mind. They don't get the serious environmental problems it causes."

On Monday, Greenfield, pictured below, was on day eight of the 30-day journey.

The average American generated around 4.4 pounds of trash per day in 2013, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. While some of the trash gets recycled or composted, most of it goes to landfills, where it decomposes, releasing greenhouse gases that contribute to climate change .

Greenfield, who is a contributor to Outspeak ― which has a publishing partnership with the Huffington Post ― is hoping to make more people aware of the problem of everyday waste, and ideally get some to change their ways.

"It's not about going zero waste tomorrow," Greenfield said. "It might just be that tomorrow you decide not to use plastic cups anymore, and carry your own reusable cup. That could be around 300 fewer cups tossed in a year... If all of us do small things, it adds up to a bigger change."

Greenfield is partnering with filmmakers from Living On One film studio to document his project, called . They will be posting videos of his progress on and through mid-October.

Greenfield wasn't always this environmentally conscious. Five years ago, aged 25, he was a self-described "typical" guy working in advertising sales.

"I lived in a three-bedroom apartment, had a nice car that I shined every Sunday. I was very materialistic," Greenfield said. "Then I started reading up on these issues, watching Netflix documentaries. I started making little changes ― and here I am."

Now Greenfield is a full-time environmental activist, living an almost zero-waste life. His previous projects have included going a year without showering to save water, and only having 111 possessions to live more sustainably.

"To exist for me costs about a couple hundred dollars a month," Greenfield said. "For food, I often get it from grocery store dumpsters , which raises awareness about food waste. And for shelter, I'm mostly traveling for projects, so I stay with whichever project I'm helping out with."

This month's project will mark a departure from Greenfield's usual waste-free lifestyle, as he will have to consume and toss garbage as a typical person would.

On the upside, the trash he'll generate won't go to a landfill, as he plans on keeping his garbage-filled suit for future public speaking appearances.

" My goal in life is to do things that get people to think about how their actions affect the world," Greenfield said. "I would love people to transform their lives, to live out the things they believe in and are sharing on Facebook ― and not just share it, but actually do it."

BEFORE YOU GO

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This Guy Is Wearing Every Piece Of Garbage He Generates For A Month

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This guy's outfit is totally trash-y! Environmental activist Rob Greenfield is collecting every single piece of garbage he generates in a month ― from his morning coffee cup to his grocery bag ― and wearing it.