If you haven’t been in to see the Shelter exhibit, we put up a big  “Idea Board” (see image below) so visitors could share their ideas around Shelter. There are some really great ones there, and I thought I’d share a few of them in the waning days of the exhibit (Shelter closes Sunday, November 14th at 4pm).  Here’s one that mentioned something to check out online – the ParaSITE Shelter. Thanks to Addison Lanier for leaving this with us!

the Idea Board

The paraSITE - an inflatable shelter for the homeless that runs off expelled HVAC air

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