The House is directly referred to the idea of protection, shelter, habitation and intimate space.

Snails and turtles don't need of an external construction, they live portable. Their shell is their shelter.

Keywords: house, shelter, collapsible, pattern, portable, radio, transmitter, receiver, cardboard.

As my thesis project (read my paper here) , and part of the research with homeless (read The Annual Homeless Assessment Report to Congress here), my motivation first came from collapsible structures and observing the work of Buckminster Fuller and Cage "overpopulation and Art" hear here.and Sol LeWitt. Inhabitable collapsible structure made of cardboard becomes a shelter able to provide an address to a defined group of unsheltered homeless persons, by means of radio devices, proposing a way to integrate them to society.
How to make visible this layer of the population by using technology?

4 prototypes will be given to Saint Francis Church, were every morning they provide a meal to 20-200 unsheltered (mentally ill) homeless.

4 homeless will take the shelter with themselves to the sidewalk of the Church were they usually sleep (until the police come). Each shelter will have a wireless device transmitting radio frequencies to a hand held receiver.

The data will be heard as mp3's, traduced to: name, age, place of origin of the person using the shelter.

Since my definitive arrival to NYC, on Septemeber 13th, 2005, I had been walking and observing the city, while I realized the strong social contrast between classes, overall when talking about homeless in the streets and how the city addresses this issue.
The threshold between developing new and better technologies and how to integrate even the most abandoned ones.Although I had the fantasy of having a portable "house" made of paper before coming to ITP, addressing it with homelessness is my risponse to UBIQUITOUS COMPUTING and my concern in regards to accesability.How to make visible this layer of the population by using technology?

My constraints: poor material and simple new technology put together.

From cardboard grabbed from the streets and a simple building strategy, SHELLHOUSE was inspired by the geometric origami techniques. 1 Xbee (radio device) will be embedded into the cardboard.

The more number of SHELLHOUSE there are in the streets, the better is the possibility to have a chance of developing the radio technology (signal strenght, distance transmission) to have better interactions (help) with unshelter homeless in the future.My propossal is to upload the patterns (using the DIY structure) for people with access to internet, be able to download them and build this object with xbees and give it to a homeless person. See my thesis presentation here

Please visit: www.shellhouse.org