It  requires neither insurance nor fuel, is available, durable and portable,and provides an accessible means  for people to move their belongings and other items around. It is the shopping cart, icon not only of consumerism, but homelessness. Spurred on by the increasing number of homeless people he was seeing, movie producer Peter Samuelson (Revenge of the Nerds) partnered with the Pasadena Art Center College of Design for a design contest to develop a solution for the most common desire he heard from the homeless folks he talked to – to have a roof over their head. The result was the EDAR, and as of the article on CNN, they had created 60 units. Essentially a better shopping cart, Samuelson views the EDAR as a stop-gap solution that he hopes will one day be unnecessary. See video below:

(Embedded video from CNN Video)

Designboom also hosted a non-profit design competition called “Shelter in Cart”, which generated many, many potential variations on this theme, including “Hown” (image below).

Regardless of long-term effectiveness, I think all these designs were genuinely inspired by a desire to improve conditions for homeless people, which I find pretty encouraging.

"Hown", by Panagiotis Dramitinos, Karaolis Alkis, Alexandros Papageorgiou, Greece, winner of the "Shelter in a Cart" design competition by Designboom

Thanks to all who made it out to the opening reception for Shelter on Friday night! It was a busy night, lots of people came out, and I really enjoyed seeing some familiar faces and meeting some new folks as well. With the entry deadline for the 10 square design competition coming up before long, I thought I’d start posting some tiny house videos that might serve as inspiration.

Here’s one by Jay Schafer of the Tumbleweed Tiny House Company who you may well have heard of – he seems to be fairly prominent in the tiny house field (although it’s not a big field), but a nice tour of his wee home nonetheless. It’s a pretty resolved space, not that inexpensive, particularly with his labour included, but relative to a house or even many cars it’s still pretty reasonable. More to come.