WikiHouse Design Principles

For many people WikiHouse is a digitally fabricated plywood chassis, it’s a big IKEA kit for your home that is easy to assemble and affordable. While this is true, one thing is often overlooked and that’s the WikiHouse Design Principles. These acknowledge the fact that WikiHouse isn’t just about supporting one technology, it’s about establishing the fundamentals and the principles that create a foundation for many different technologies.

As someone who talks to a lot of people interested in WikiHouse, this is something that often comes up. Mainly because WikiHouse today has one tested and viable technology. Wren.

Structural sheet materials like plywood are great in some economies and environments, but they don’t work everywhere. It’s one type of solution for one type of problem. A question I then pose to people is…

What do the WikiHouse Design Principles look like when they’re in your environment, in your backyard?

So I thought why not give these principles a bit of limelight, instead of showing more pretty pictures of beautiful plywood chassis’s being raised.

Share global, manufacture local

‘It is easier to ship recipes than cakes and biscuits’ — John Maynard Keynes

Be lazy like a fox

Don’t keep reinventing the wheel. Take something that already works, copy, adapt, give credit and re-share. (Thanks Linus Torvalds via Eric S Raymond)

Design to lower thresholds

Design to lower barriers of time, cost, skill, energy and resources at every stage. Elvis Costello wrote all his songs to be played on the cheapest transistor radio.

Share and make shareable

Publish your work under an open source share-alike licence, documented and codified so as to make it as easy as possible for others to understand, modify, improve, distribute and use it, including commercially.

Open standards

Where possible, work to existing standards or seek to establish intuitive new ones.

Open materials

Design for cheap, abundant, standardised, sustainable, and, ideally, circular materials.

Human friendly

Seek to preserve and maximise the safety, security, health and wellbeing (physical and mental) of all participants at every stage of a product’s life.

Start somewhere

No one can solve everyone’s problems. Design something that works where you are, then share so others can adapt it for their own economy, climate and culture. Let solutions adapt like Darwin’s finches.

Modular

Design hardware and software that is robust, interoperable, product-agnostic and flexible, so elements can be independently altered, substituted or upgraded.

Include, keep including

Look for ways in which age, race, gender or disability might be barriers, and try to design them out. Try to design products, processes and documents that are accessible, intuitive and non-discriminatory.

The new ‘normal’

Avoid design which would be considered ‘alternative’, ‘boutique’ or only for the rich or poor. Instead, design for the new normal: products most people would consider desirable and affordable. As beautiful as Apple, as open as Linux.

Mistake proof

Make it impossible to get wrong, or not matter if you do (the Japanese call this ‘Poka-Yoke’).

Whole life design

‘A home is not something you finish’ — Stewart Brand Design for the entire life-cycle of the product, from manufacturing to assembly, use, maintenance, adaptation, disassembly and re-use.

Superpower the users

‘Give power to the fine tuners’ — Cedric Price. Afford as much power as possible to the end users, from procurement to privacy to electricity. Democracy is a design diagram.

If you can’t mend it, you don’t own it.

Try to avoid ‘black box’ products. Try to make it easy for the user to learn how it works.

WikiHouse is developing a growing library of tools, types and technologies. To contribute to any of these just visit the library.