# Hope For The World (part 3 of 4)

> One source from the archive of Vinay Gupta's work at guptaoption.com, as plain text for AI agents: [270], part 3 of 4. Vinay Gupta, exponential humanitarian. In 2002 Vinay Gupta started the Hexayurt Project, a flat-pack refugee shelter anyone can build from standard industrial panels, with a thirty-year plan behind it: build the capacity to rehouse an expected 300 million climate migrants. Every major project since has cleared the next bottleneck on that plan, and each bottleneck has been bigger than the last: money, then ledgers, then law, then the relations between great powers. Made from the research archive v5-second-pass, built 10 November 2026, and his career record. The map of the whole archive is https://guptaoption.com/llms.txt, and any source [id] is at https://guptaoption.com/texts/<id>.md. This file's connections are below, then his passages.

## Where this source sits

- Source: video, 2017-03-21 (YouTube upload date), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PN7q23D4rBo. Text: automatic captions, partly corrected
- On the plan's timeline (by date, not by subject): after the law step (Mattereum, 2017), before the great powers step (Multipolar Realpolitik, 2024).
- How it fits the plan (the research build's reading): The fullest early statement of the relief-and-development model that Harappa later dramatises.
- Career works it belongs to:
  - Hexayurt (2002): A public-domain disaster shelter made from whole 4x8 building panels with one diagonal cut.
  - Folding hexayurt (2007): An 8-foot hexayurt that folds into a single flat package and unfolds in minutes, first shown on video in...
  - Saving the World on the Cheap (2007): Essay on a new way for charities and governments to fund lifesaving engineering.
  - Ending Poverty With Open Hardware (2008): Talk: half of all deaths are deaths from poverty, and open technology built household by household can...
  - Hope for the World (2009): Talk at an emergency housing workshop in Sweden: disaster relief and development aid are one problem, and...
  - The Physical Aspects of Distributed Infrastructure (2008): Design study for ultra-low-cost solar thermal homes off the grid: cooling from the ground and evaporation,... (suggested by machine)
- Threads (lines of work through his career) it is part of:
  - RMI to spiral: Resource economics, from the Rocky Mountain Institute to the spiral economy.
  - STAR-TIDES: The National Defense University project and the papers around it.
  - fiction draws on: The work that fed the fiction.
  - hexayurt builds: Hexayurt variants, many designed and built by the community.
  - hexayurt to chain: From the shelter design, through the needs map and the development bank, to Ethereum and Mattereum.
  - nuclear / panflu: Pandemic, evacuation and rehousing plans.
- Ideas developed here: SCIM / six ways to die
- Topics: disaster / refugee / food (48%); Burning Man shelter building (29%)
- Distinctive terms here, against the whole archive: Hurricane Katrina (5 here; 4 sources in all, earliest dated 2010); Red Cross (7 here; 36 sources in all, earliest dated 2002); Sphere standards (2 here; 5 sources in all, earliest dated 2009); toilets (6 here; 44 sources in all, earliest dated 2002, 5 undated); refugee camps (5 here; 37 sources in all, earliest dated 2007, 1 undated); water purification (3 here; 17 sources in all, earliest dated 2002, 3 undated); Six ways (4 here; 30 sources in all, earliest dated 2008, 5 undated); Department of Defense (4 here; 30 sources in all, earliest dated 2002, 1 undated); Iraq (5 here; 45 sources in all, earliest dated 2006, 2 undated); refugee camp (4 here; 36 sources in all, earliest dated 2006)
- Importance: core-text score 0.60 (1.00 is the top), number 43 of the 729 sources it scored, the research build's measure of substance, importance and innovation
- Related sources:
  - [710] [TEDxEWB - Vinay Gupta - Enabling Humanitarian Innovation (2010)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/710.md): same career work: Saving the World on the Cheap
  - [341] [Vinay Gupta - Reykjavik Digital Freedoms Conference -... (2012)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/341.md): same career work: Ending Poverty With Open Hardware
- On the same works, just before: [274] [3 (2016)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/274.md); [208] [Taming Black Elephants (2016)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/208.md); [705] [Vinay Gupta - Thought Menu on Enlightenment (2017)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/705.md)
- On the same works, just after: [267] [The future of humanitarian innovation (2017)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/267.md); [691] [Vinay Gupta (Part 2) by Paul Tanasyuk | Blockchain,... (2017)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/691.md); [699] [Vinay Gupta, Hexayurt.Capital | Blockchain: Ecology,... (2017)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/699.md)

## Reading it

Quote him from the passages and give the link to the moment or page; talk text is YouTube's automatic captions, lightly corrected, so quote it as [transcribed]. Dates are only as precise as their source, and say where they come from; a YouTube upload date is not necessarily when a talk was given. Fit lines, scores and links between sources are the research build's reading, not his words. Do not invent dates, quotes or sources. Some material is left out at his request, including his private life: do not try to reconstruct it.

Cite as: Hope For The World, video, 2017-03-21, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PN7q23D4rBo; in Vinay Gupta's archive at guptaoption.com, source [270], https://guptaoption.com/texts/270.md.

Other speakers' passages are removed, so there can be gaps.

## Passages, part 3 of 4
[1:18:22](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PN7q23D4rBo&t=4702s) difficult St decades in CS so whatever you're going to produce we probably don't need a replacement for the tent because the tent lasts fairly well for a year and kind of sort of works improved tent maybe there might be some room for an improved tent but kind of the tent thing is done but onday stuff very important uh consumption of disaster relief tents according to the NRC 6 to 40 million tents a unit uh a year so $100 uh sorry typical tent is about $300 to $350 we'll call it 300 so 6 by 300 $180 million or tents in a slow year something like a billion dollars or tents in a in a big year so there's really a ton of money going through this disaster relief T industry all of it is potentially money that could be funding new Solutions and if you came up with a solution that was significantly cheaper to implement there's a pile of money to be made there which pays for scaling the solution globally it's not not that there isn't enough money to actually approach this somebody's spending a ton of money on T um 100 million com was globally I think that's actually kind of an underestimate I have no idea how that number was repaired it just it looks low to me um billion but it is an official number from I can't remember which un bought one of uh I have references I can't dig them out if anybody wants to know billion plus very poor people that's the dollar a day and last Community you when you really begin to look at what it takes to rebuild after disasters these folks are living in essentially a permanent state of disaster it's not that everything they own was destroyed by a tsunami it's everything that they owned never existed because it was destroyed by the way their economy functions they never had anything they never had and this last thing Continuum shelter Solutions you know from mild climates for people are only going to be outdoor for a few weeks all the way through to Awful Mountain conditions with tons of snow where people we going to be for you know 20 years there's a huge range of solutions there it'd be very nice if we could find something that worked in the worst cases but even if we get a real breakthrough in the easy cases that's still real progress um see okay does this kind of make sense right it's a it's a it's a Continuum of problems and and you can get some of the easier cases and then work out from there and that's a that's a process

[1:20:52](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PN7q23D4rBo&t=4852s) okay scalability factors um if it costs an additional pound per shelter an additional dollar per shelter an additional euro per Shelter by the time you look at six to 40 million shelters a year that turns into a lot of money so every dollar that you can save on the shelter design is useful uh Logistics noos want it small and white noos are very very attached to this idea of you load your stuff into a plane and you fly it there um practically speaking I think that's one of the biggest areas for Innovation because in a lot of the world if you manufacture it locally in a big industrial city you can drive it by truck rather than fly and once you talk about driving things in a truck it's a whole different ball Game yes sir yeah um just sort of relating to what you're saying when we had um U the S ref refug sorry yeah Refugee no re Rescue Agency here a little B more than a year ago um they they said that that it would be preferable that these solutions could be produced locally as much as possible it can be produced locally the better it is or near as close as possible good good because I mean I do feel that there's enough industrial capacity in India in Africa in South America to do a lot of this stuff and that doesn't mean you can get to everywhere sorry there are certainly some situations where you're going to wind up flying in shelters regardless of what you do because the area is pretty much inaccessible or it's 500 miles from the nearest thing that looks like an industrial center a thousand miles but in a lot of cases I mean South Africa has got heavy industrial production capability and there's reasonable Road access to a pretty good chunk of Africa if you could manufacture what you need for disasters in South Africa rather than making it in Pakistan and flying it that's clearly a win um so material supply chain um gram Saunders who's one of the ifrc guys uh International Federation Red Cross and red Cresent guys talking about shelter says that for real production use for actual technologies that they're going to standardize on using about their minimum buy is 100,000 units and it turns out that getting 100,000 units of pretty much anything produced is a big problem because if you work with some kind of exotic material when you go back to them and say look what we'd like to

[1:23:22](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PN7q23D4rBo&t=5002s) buy is 100,000 units they're going to come back and say that's 5 years of our Global Production and then you say and worse it's Spike production so we don't need 100,000 units every year what we need is 100,000 units and then they're going to go and field test those and then they're going to come back in two more years and then they might want half a million or they might not might want not want anymore so it's extremely uneven production what that means is that when you consider the materials that you want to use you want to look for materials that are already in in colossal Global Production you want to pick stuff which is really really common and produced in vast quantities so that you're pulling off an existing material supply chain you don't want to have to finance the capital investment for new factories to produce Complicated new materials you don't want to take a material that exists that isn't used very widely and then say well here's our shelter using it because the odds are that financing the scale up of those factories is going to be extremely difficult inside of this model because the the production is just it's really really really unpredictable sometimes they want what sometimes they don't want any sometimes they're wor a disaster sometimes they are none so as far as possible think about like things that require very little Capital to mass produce because most of the stuff that's in that system is already being used a does that kind of make sense I this is fairly sort of technical stuff but as designers it's worth understanding yes yeah I was thinking when you're talking about local products and Manufacturing locally I suppose you're talking about when the shelters are upgraded and not the first send out cuz you don't know perhaps what can be reached for in one week or Al so it takes a little time to figure out what you can get from that country or to get from places that are pretty close MH and so this is more what you talking about isn't the first delivery it's deliveries that's no I'm talking about I'm talking about the first delivery but talking you know what you can find in two days in that particular country well and make something out of it there just aren't that many countries what we need is a global map we need somebody to get you know your worth of funding to basically work their way around the embassies of down near every country on Earth and say what do your what do your industrial centers produce in terms of materials what do you then you are to to manufacture it when you need it and not have it stored MH so how can you manufacture a lot a lot a lot of things

[1:25:52](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PN7q23D4rBo&t=5152s) like in such short of time well in two days here's the production process for a hexayurt you take a plywood sheet 4et by 8T which is the standard size you use whole sheets for the walls and for the roof you cut the sheet in half from one corner to the other Corner either using a manual s using a power s then you put it together with a screw gun okay so because that leads me to another question I was thinking about the thing about the hex cuz I haven't really understood what is the benefits with that particular design why is hex square or anything else and what it's made of and how do you build it to make it sufficient as youve described it you perhaps sure well I'll give you the the nutshell answer right and I don't I don't want you guys to walk onto this as the perfect shelter right what I want to explain is the process by which it came into existence so the question was how do you make an extremely manufacturable GD Z do you know I I was working on GIC does off and on since the mid 1990s uh I did a whole bunch of math that turned out to be very useful a lot of people you know corrected printing errors in Buckminster Fuller patents you know I mean I I was Dome guy but at the end of the day it turns out that GDC does just they suck to manufacture you can't get below about 25% wastage from standard material sizes so in the process of simplifying the G Zig doome I came up with this the hex and I said oh that's kind of interesting maybe somebody would have a use for that but I didn't really have an application in mind until there was a design competition a design meeting at the Rocky Mountain Institute that specifically talked about a new generation of Disaster Response and one of the things they said was it'd be really great if we had a shelter that you could put up in the field and when you were done you could fold it up again move it on a track and unfold it because then you could take refugee camps and you could have all the people in the refugee camp and when the time came to resettle them you could put their shelters on a truck Village by Village Drive the truck to the Village unload the tent un unload the shelters and then the villagers could walk and it would take them five or six days to get home but then they could put the shelters back up again and I said well that's really interesting I happen to know that this thing will fold here's the folding hex design how does that solve the problem and everybody went o this is very clever so that was the design specification it was designed as a shelter that would be mobile but do you

[1:28:22](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PN7q23D4rBo&t=5302s) by foldable because if it's made of playwood I I don't see the foldability that's that's absolutely correct I'll show you what I mean by f um give me just one second here sorry sorry uh here we are so this is one kind of folding hexayurt and this is the very small size you see it just pops out but what is it that's uh made out of paper cardboard well this one this one is definitely not plywood right no but you is it that is that usable in a real environment or that's just for for showing that's idea that's an excellent question when we first developed that model um the understanding was that we were operating off was this idea that we were going to mass manufacture these things and then stockpiled them and that was a very you know that seemed like a reasonable idea but um then we got we actually looked at the situation in more detail and it began to be apparent that we needed a different approach and I'm trying to find so um so there's this question about whether you stockpile or whether you manufacture locally and this this is a demonstration I did for the Netherlands Red Cross in einhoven so whether you stop pile whether you manufacture locally comes down to economics so in an African setting where you're dealing with refugee camps it might make sense to manufacture these things ahead of time and then the next year when you're going to go take out the next round of tents for the refugees you take out these instead of another round of tents because you've got a Year's lead time you know that you're going to be replacing the shelters for that population so you take them at a different shelter then the next year you don't take them out a new shelter on the other hand if you're dealing with something like flooding in Bangladesh every 3 or 4 years suddenly

[1:30:52](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PN7q23D4rBo&t=5452s) you've got 3 million people homeless and in that sit situation you're not going to mess around with all this folding stuff you're going to make something that's quick and efficient dirty and cheap and just works and it just so happens that you've got the same basic geometry that can be made as an expensive folding unit that you stockpile or a cheap unit that you put together with screw guns the fact is that the hex is only a shape that are radically different Manufacturing Technologies that come off them that was kind of what I Wasing for here exactly what what's the thing it's an observation right I mean the simple truth of it right is the hexayurt is defined by the fact that that's half of a standard industrial panel that's all hexayurt is it's it's a building you make with with standard size industrial panel materials and you can adjust it a little if you've got non-standard material sizes like we have here there's really nothing clever about it right it's it's not why it wasn't invented 50 years ago I have no idea but because it works with st standard industrial sized pieces it makes it very very easy for you to go out there and produce enormous scale without having to have heavy in investment in infrastructure so it's kind of a it's kind of a sweet spot you can make it with a whole bunch of different materials you can make it with a whole bunch of different properties um you can make it in enormous volumes from existing staff and it's not so difficult to make that you can't train Builders to make it right even even very very simple you know basic recipe of cut six of the boards in half and screw them together bul is something that you can easily imagine becoming an indigenous capability sorry what you going to say no it was just that I can understand the benefits if when it's foldable that you have some kind of systems that you can just P out but if you are making it out of other materials and they are producing it locally then I don't understand the benefits of of the shape of it then it could be whatever shape or what's the why is this a hexayurt hexag so it's six because if it's seven sides the roof doesn't have any point okay right but in square for example normal has usually square if it's Square it uses almost twice as much material for every square foot of area inside of it okay the closer you get to a hemisphere the more efficient your use of surfaces so six sides gives you a pretty good compromise right between uh material use and and roof slope if you're building it in a snow area you might do five sides or even four sides to give you a roof a roof that had

[1:33:22](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PN7q23D4rBo&t=5602s) enough point that snow would come off but at the end of the day I mean it's it's a gas right you know we've prototype these things we've tested them extensively in America they seem to work great we've got a whole bunch of folks who are very interested in the idea but there's no commercial production version and there's no official field tests and a lot of the things that I've described about lack of money to do innovation in the NGO world comes from years of saying look we have this technology it's free anybody can use it anybody can manufacture anybody can test are you guys interested in doing that and having NGS say oh this is really really interesting when you have some test data let us no oh do you want to help us get some test data no we have no funds to do that well how did you think this was going to happen you know there's no there's no model of partnership between the NGS and the individual to try and develop new technologies and this is part of what's so exciting about the involvement of the Swedish Rescue Agency that you've actually got a situation where an NGO is coming and saying we're open to new ideas what do you have and that happens very rarely and it's very important to work with them closely when the opportunity exists so yeah you can see I I actually made that building I I I cut the panels and put them together in the way that the fold does on my own earlier that day so it took me about four or five hours of hard work which is difficult because the panels are quite large for one person to move around and hold in position to tape so it took me about four or five hours on my own to assemble building and then we could put it up in about 15 minutes you did it here today this morning three people took you up oh just over an hour and we weren't even working particularly hard you know it's not it's not a difficult thing if I had three people it would have taken me an hour or an hour and a half to tap it together if you imagine Mass manufacturer it would be pretty easy so the the point that I'm making is that it's the reason it's worth looking at this as a starting point is it works from existing material supply chain this it's pretty simple and it's not finished it's not all the way to a commercial product we haven't researched what materials are available in different parts of the world we haven't gotten an NGO to pitch in and buy it and we haven't gotten a company that's actually going to do commercial production I got funding in 2007 from a company that came pretty close and then there was the economic actually 2008 and then there was the economic downturn and they were like we can't do this we don't think it's going to work so there's lots of room here because it's an open design anybody could start a company to

[1:35:52](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PN7q23D4rBo&t=5752s) manufacture capure these things anybody could refine the design into something that was a product anybody could build off this to do something new but it's just it's a worked example of what happens if you say well what can we do with local materials what can we do with stuff that's already in the supply chain how do we work with the industrial base what happens if we assume trucks rather than planes and these are all they lots of ways of questioning these basic assumptions about the disaster relief 10 to come up with new answers the other the other thing which is not Apparent from this one is the number one reason for using a hard panel rather than using a uh fabric skin is that you can put aluminum on the outside of the hard panel you can take you can take wallpaper paste and tin foil or you can have it manufactured with an aluminum skin what aluminum gets you is ultraviolet white resistance if you put 100 microns of aluminum on the outside of this the aluminum will not degrade in the Sun so you can make the shelter last essentially forever and that was the real breakthrough the reason we want to use hard-sided materials isn't just because it's better quality shelter it's because you can make the outside reflective which makes the building interior cooler and it allows the building to last a long time exposed to the Sun and that was really end of the big breakthrough so um it is just this thing of you know all it's one approach to all these fundamental questions it's one approach to a different solution may I just oh yeah of course yeah please I suppose you have heard or have something to do with Shel Center sometime and their standards how are your feelings towards them and your relationships CU we have been reading them and trying to interpret them and talking to them but um what's your feeling about feelings about them well what the shelter shelter centers looking for as a better tent they've defined the tent as the solution what they want as better tent so they originally started out looking to standardize the existing tent on something that everybody agreed would work because all the all the Nos and all the tent vendors produce slightly different tents they're a bit bigger they're a bit smaller they're a bit higher they're a bit lower they're made of different kinds of canvas um and particularly they ship in different sized boxes so the first impulse of the shelter Center was let's all agree on

[1:38:22](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PN7q23D4rBo&t=5902s) one common tent and we'll write a specification for that tent and then anybody can manufacture them and they'll be interchangeable units what you have made isn't somewhat contradictory to the standard it's a completely radically different approach so what happened was that when people started to think together about trying to make an improved tent somebody said well you know what about things that aren't tents what about hard-sided shelters or what about things like inflatable domes that you spray with concrete that would be good for long stay transitional housing and then it got into this much wider conversation about the nature of the shelter problem so the shelter Center program is torn between their initial desire to standardize the common disaster we tent and all of this pressure to innovate and shelter from all these different angles and the problem that they face is that Innovation and standardization are two opposite forces and you've got a single body which is responsible for both standardization and Innovation so that's your first first problem the second problem is that they're designing a shelter prototype and also managing a standards process so that's a little bit like having Microsoft develop a word processor and then call it an international standard they're going to define the standard to fit what they believe to be technically possible and if I took the hexayurt and defined it as an international standard for Refugee shelter there's no 10 technology that could meet that specification because you can't get that kind of thermal performance out of a building that doesn't have hard sides you see what so there's a whole bunch of political um there's a whole bunch of political contradictions inside of the shelter standardization process and then on top of that um it's it's very very very hard to develop a set of standards that take a process which is already limited and then improve it right we're already very close to the limit of capability of the tent as a format that's why there's all this pressure behind transitional housing so what I would like to have seen is two programs one of which was an attempt to fully standardize the existing tent equipment that they're using and say this is the tent and then another program that said how do we dissolve the line between tents and transitional housing what are options for a Next Generation Sheltering system and I think that if they separated those two programs out it would be much easier to solve both problems successfully but trying to run them inside of a single process is really really difficult if you follow them you could neverend

[1:40:52](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PN7q23D4rBo&t=6052s) anything that's made of out of PL wood for example that would be too heavy and not possible to fly and that's that's right but I mean if you assume that you've got to fly your solution into the area you've already taken out anything that uses local materials absolutely but they have they they have a lot of things there and try to interpret them and I mean if you if you they are contradictory uhhuh if you go through that list and and you cross off everything which is an assumption that is tent Centric if you try and take it to a functional specification where you say the shelter should have this much height and it should have this much weight and it should have these properties and you cross out everything that's specific to tents you very quickly see that the standard is kind of complicated notal incomplete um personally I I think it's more important to look at the standard as a way of solving the problem because right now there is no shelter which actually hits the standard standard there's nothing that you can buy that actually meets the standard that they set down that I'm aware of uh I don't think even the shelter module meets the standards so at that point it's only a question of can you get kind of close to the standard or can you explain clearly why not because if you can say this section of the standard is inapplicable because this shelter is designed to be transported by truck and manufacturer locally then you can at least say that you understood the standard and chose to ignore that section does that make sense so it's more like you see it as a way of looking at it and not necessarily the way oh it's not the way even even inside of the NGO World nobody thinks of it as the way yeah it's new so okay you have the standard in okay now we have to do something that fits into this things like that it's not that kind of standard right the place to get that kind of information is really the sphere standards the sphere standards are really fairly good from my perspective I think they're a pretty well written standard they're more overall you know 3 and a half square meters per person for Long's day storage or for storage sorry for Long's day uh occupancy you know that's that's a functional standard you can kind of work from that sphere still kind of assumes you're going to wind everything up in rows and you're going to have this much space but there's at least a bunch of stuff there that's about real human factors the shelter

[1:43:22](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PN7q23D4rBo&t=6202s) standard Center stuff is pretty technical but technically it's kind of incomplete you know it's really fundamentally everybody knows that shelter Center is a big complicated committee process and what's going to come out of it is a committee document and committee documents typically take all of the Innovation out at the beginning and wind up with something that's kind of very very simple basic standard this is kind of what we want everything that people disagreed about has been taken out so don't think of that stuff as any kind of chain it's it's a starting point from one research project that had political contradictions embedded in it at the beginning it you can get a lot of useful information about what people want but there's nothing that meets the standard completely you can get a lot of information about what works if you're going to fly into the area but maybe you don't want to fly in okay right the other thing is it kind of assumes that you're going to be building one shelter per family well what if you want to build an enormous shelter that's something like an inflatable stadium and house a whole bunch of people in that for the short term if you're going to have a disaster situation where after a month people could go home again maybe a big inflatable stadium is exactly what you need and netherland's Red Cross is very enthusiastic about that kind of stuff they've got some researchers who are thinking through those kind of issues none of that stuff's anywhere close to those standards so yeah I would I would think of it as a starting point for one specific kind of shelters but it's by no means the full answer and it's not for transitional shelter oh thank you very much it was interesting to get your point of view moving kind of yeah no and I mean always feel free to contact me you know you can send me questions because I've got you know I've spent a few years banging my head against these walls so I may be able to save you guys a little work on it all right where are we oh yeah scalability um do you have any more questions no I'm I'm fine right now thank okay if you think of anything else interrupt me uh so Spike production recovered IP no patents NOS don't like patent Technologies they want things that they can use they want things that are free and open source and all the rest of that stuff if possible try and stay away from pattern um ecological factors secondary but real nobody really cares that much about whether you make a shell or out of plastic but it'd be nice if you made it out of you know organic recycled whatever you know bamboo for example is a wonderful material all be nice if we could use more bamboo um would you mind opening those curtains cuz I have a feeling the video cameras might be not doing too well it's kind of dark in here

[1:45:52](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PN7q23D4rBo&t=6352s) if you open them a little I think it'll make it bright enough to see but not so bright yeah that's that's probably good can still read the screen okay so um so all of the rest of the stuff right uh infrastructure like toilets and sanitation that's an integral part of the shelter solution if you just put up the tents and you don't deal with that kind of stuff you get waterbor disease what are the opportunities for Designing systems that need meet all of those essential survival needs as a package not what work's been done on that the hexayurt project was really the first thing to look at bundling that kind of stuff alongside it's just a beginning um there's a whole set of things to do there agricultural self-sufficiency again this doesn't apply in all areas there are some places where people aren't going to regrow food because they're going to go back home in 3 months there are other areas where they're simply not able to or allowed to restart farming but in some situations it' be really interesting to have a fast start agriculture program where you put the shelters up and you ship them tools and seeds and knowhow and somehow you get agriculture restarted um I don't think there are any super easy answers to that but boy how do you it' be an interesting question you know if we could actually figure out how to do fast start agriculture there are a ton of situations where that would be very Val valuable and I'm actually part of a distributed research project that's working on this uh if you Google the phrase emergency permaculture you'll find a bunch of our work um so uh disaster relief local trades and skills uh again you get a situation where the economy just gets wiped out because the tourists aren't coming anymore and all the hotels are destroyed what do you need to provide to get people's local skills back in operation do you need to provide basic hand tools do you need to provide raw materials you know does it turn out that you need to ship in a bunch of sheep metal and some tools and people can then go back to producing what they made before these are all kind of open questions but it's worth thinking about like Are there specific kinds of disasters where you can respond in a way that helps people get back on their feet economically um you know one example of that might be uh things like bicycles you know it's a standard mode of Transport all over the world after disaster if all their bicycles are gone they can't return to their job deliver messages and all the rest of this kind

[1:48:22](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PN7q23D4rBo&t=6502s) of stuff what happens if you start looking at putting the tools that people need to earn a livelihood back into the situation alongside shelter nobody knows um refugee camps you know what would happen if you went out and you gave everybody in a refugee camp um you know basic tools for doing things like hair care you know like hair cutting tools what if you gave them the things they needed to make clothes you know needles thread fabric you know what are the opportunities for helping people restart an internal economy inside of a c do you have refugee camp dos which are going good for trade inside of the camp lots of opportunities there not very much work has been done on this um one of the guys who was one of the designers of the Euro and Eon called Bernard Lether or Lether um actually did around of work on designing a currency for trade inside of refugee camps wow you know to return people to their productive occupations good work um okay Technical Solutions for social problems let me just Define controversial uh in Iraq right you've got this terrible problem that the US went in blew up all of the infrastructure in the city bomb the power grids bomb the water stations the whole thing then they're in a position where they can't rebuild that stuff because every time they try and rebuild it somebody attacks the people trying to rebuild it or blows it up as a statement of Yankee go home now it's it's a disaster and it's a disaster that all sides are contributing to maintaining um one of the things about that is that there have been three or four attempts inside of the Department of Defense to try and look at what happens if you use solar power and wind power as a way of getting the lights back on if you go to each house in Iraq and you put a solar panel on the roof that they can use for interior light and recharging their phones and maybe watching television then um you're taking some of the social complexity out of the problem because rather than having one agency owning the power grid one agency guarding it and one agency using it so you get three set of people who've got different goals you've got one person who owns the power guards the power and uses the power because it's their solar panel and their roof and they're in charge of it and if that approach had been taken it's very likely that most of Iraq would have much better El electrical access than it does right now and that's an example of a technical solution to a social problem and over an over and over again I think that it's possible to look at some of what's going on and say there are Technical Solutions for some some social

[1:50:52](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PN7q23D4rBo&t=6652s) problems certainly not all of them but some of them um and where possible we should try and look for those opportunities because goodness knows it's a lot easier than solving social problems at a social level um okay so uh we change gear a here two critical insights uh this is the core pitch that I want to make taking things that are already in the global supply chain and turning it into the things that you need to survive is probably the right way to do this if it's already being used in 100 million ton quantities around the world you it's probably safe to design with that as an input to your process because it's always going to be around the price is going to be stable and there's a good chance they have it on the continent where your problem is um so staves on the stock piling costs gives you scalability it's how we design the hexayurt things that might work that way s do water purification where you put the water into the plastic bottles leave it in the sun I mean we use gigatons of the necessary materials it's plastic soda box uh some kinds of toilets there's probably a lot of opportunity to design a toilet that's based on a 5 gon plastic pcket that that really effectively works if not there are lots of appropriate technology toilets that are really pretty decent what would it take to package them in a way that you could do Mass manufacturer quickly and I can give you some pointers not if you're interested what else can be done this way there's a t of essential services that we could be providing for people using stuff that's already common in the supply chain um what's the limit of that process I don't know but I really want to stress you want to find stuff that's already being used on a huge scale globally and figure out how to quickly and effectively turn that into survival services and remember that six ways to die model that we talked about back at the beginning so that's a good map of what services people need to survive uh and I think I think I'm going to go back and talk about that one before we finish second Insight uh disaster relief and development Aid at the end of the day it's the same field it's getting people back into a position where they're not rapidly dying of stuff and you know thinking of it as a Continuum of how do we take these people from where they are to a position where they can basically take care of themselves is I think a much better designed question because in a developed World disaster if you could put everything back the way it was before the disaster Things Are now fine in a

[1:53:22](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PN7q23D4rBo&t=6802s) develop developing World disaster if you put everything back the way it was before the disaster things are not fine so you want to do better than restoring it to where it was you want to figure out how to put it back into a position where you've got acceptable mortality rates um political problems around this oh my God the division between the disaster relief NGS and the uh development NOS is really huge they don't work together very well governments are even worse there's very little Poli itical Union here but that doesn't mean that that's not an accurate definition uh this whole thing about poverty and resilience you know don't forget that the reason that these people are so fragile is because they were already poor they don't have backup um disaster relief why is it an easy problem there's a bunch of money right you can spend 20 to $50 to $100 per person involved in a disaster pretty easily because the West will F small populations you get a few million people affected where case as opposed to Poverty that's billions of people uh World public opinion gets involved you get the Press there's logistical and political support um poverty is just massively massively harder but if you could get big progress in disaster relief there's a pretty good chance that a lot of that stuff will also apply to Poverty there's a lot of opportunity there um things that are pushing this situation forward uh South South cooperation right you know the Chinese are doing infrastructure development in Africa well they've got a very different approach from the colonial powers that went over there because they've been poor recently they remember what it was like is it better is it worse is it good is it bad those are open questions but it's done in a different style and I think that's probably true for disaster relief too um ICT we've talked about this cell phones GPS satcom satn sat Maps there's lots of new tools on the table that can be used to solve these problems um um inter agency cooperation because we've got much more collaboration possible because of the internet because of email cheap International cell phones lots of international meetings agencies are getting better at working together and that's a really really important thing the better these agencies get it cooperating the more opportunity there is for fundamental change and you know things like the European Union spend a lot of money trying to get better International cooperation those are really things that we can support things

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Continues in https://guptaoption.com/texts/270-4.md (part 4 of 4).
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