Photo: James Duncan Davidson

One of the things we’re interested in exploring here at TED is … what happens after a talk? Most often, a speaker is telling us a story without an ending — a tale that’s just beginning rather than coming to an end. That’s certainly the case with TED2013 speaker Alastair Parvin, whose project, Wikihouse, is really just getting started. Parvin has created an open-source construction set for a house, and I caught up with him in a break at the conference to get more details about some of the projects that are underway to build on it.

One application for this cookie-cutter build-your-own-house system is disaster relief. At least, if done responsibly. “Actually, the last thing you want to do after a disaster is build,” Parvin points out. But those caught up in the aftermath of an event such as an earthquake can find themselves stuck in grim emergency housing for long periods of time. Parvin describes a Wikihouse-enabled project in Christchurch, New Zealand, an area that experienced a huge earthquake in February 2011, and where citizens are still trying to rebuild.

Might Wikihouse help empower them? Parvin hopes so. “They’re looking at coming up with a construction model for sustainable housing rebuilding, led by communities there,” he explains. It’s that last phrase that’s crucial. “It’s an interesting flip from disaster relief housing to community-led development.”

Then there’s Wikihouse/Rio, which is using the system in a rather different way — as an “open-source maker lab in the heart of the favela.”

“There, they said not to worry about making a structure,” Parvin says. “Kids and teenagers can start experimenting, maybe creating furniture. Maybe that will lead to building, but it’s not about us defining what happens from the outset. It’s about being open. We’re giving people amazing tools and saying this could be a serious form of community development, but it’s led by them. If they get to the point where they want to build, that’s great.”

This diversity of applications is central to the promise and potential of Wikihouse. “It’s great to do a TED Talk,” says Parvin, for whom Wikihouse is a passion project he works on alongside the others he undertakes as part of the Zero Zero architecture collective in London. “But this is an open-source project. It’s not about me standing up on stage and showing everyone what we’ve done. It’s more about issuing an invitation to others. Frankly the less control we have, the happier we get.”

Photo: James Duncan Davidson

Designer Alastair Parvin begins this Session 4 of TED2013 with the theme “Disrupt!”

When we use the word architect or designer, Parvin suggests, we mean a professional, a person paid to design. And we believe it’s only these people who can solve the world’s biggest design problems. But he says firmly: That’s wrong.

When Parvin was about to graduate from architecture school, he immediately slammed into the 2008 crash and was met with insanely high unemployment rates for architects. Indeed, “As a society we have never needed design thinking more, and yet architecture was literally becoming unemployed,” he says. Faced with bleak prospects, new questions started arising in Parvin’s mind. It’s one thing that his peers couldn’t get jobs, but just who were they trying to get these jobs for? Why were they all scrambling to design for the top 1 percent? Why was architecture only about making buildings?

Parvin offers some solutions:
1. Don’t build. Building is about the most expensive solution you can think of to any problem. Very simply, if a building has lost its use, don’t tear it down and start again. Transform the building, don’t destroy it.
2. Go small. Everyone says we have to build to scale, but why is bigger better? Increase the number of people working on a building, and make it small. As Parvin says, “It’s possible to build cities not just by the few with a lot but the many with a bit.”
3. Go amateur. Why are only corporations building our buildings? It’s clear that everyday citizens will have to be part of developing their cities. This may be Parvin’s most innovative idea yet, and forms the basis of his talk.

We have open-source software — why not open-source hardware? Parvin introduces WikiHouse, an open-source constructive system where anyone can go online and access a free shared library of 3D models of houses. It’s simple: You can download plans to Sketchup, and print out parts for a house using a CNC machine, with standard material like plywood. The parts are numbered. No bolts are required. Essentially it’s a really, really big IKEA set … to build a house. Without traditional construction skills, an amateur can build a small house in one day.

This is a true industrial revolution.

As Linus Torvalds said, “Be lazy like a fox. Don’t reinvent the wheel every time.” Copying is fine, what’s more important is to take what already works and adapt it to your own needs. The world’s fastest-growing cities aren’t skyscraper cities, Parvin says, it’s self-made cities. If design’s great project in the twentieth century was the democratization of consumption, with companies like Coca Cola and IKEA, in the twenty-first century it’s the democratization of production.

Welcome to the world’s biggest design team.

Sanjay Dastoor is co-founder of Boosted Boards, a startup that aims to build the world’s lightest electric vehicles.

Alastair Parvin is one of a team behind WikiHouse, an experiment he describes as being the seed of design’s great project in the 21st century: the democratization of production.

Inventor, scientist, author, engineer — over his broad career, Danny Hillis has turned his ever-searching brain on an array of subjects, with surprising results.

Twice the world yo-yo champion, BLACK mixes dance, sport and performance to create unforgettable yo-yo moments.

Collaborating with brilliant public and performance artists and people in neighborhoods, Lesley Perkes instigates with imagination and public space — to transform entire atmospheres. Just like that. Ha!

In a special surprise in the session, Sergey Brin of Google appeared to talk all about Google Glass — sharing why it was created and what it can do.

Alt-rock icon Amanda Palmer believes digital content should be free, and that artists can and should be directly supported by fans via a “patronage” model.

The U.S. Congress is broken, and law professor and legal activist Larry Lessig wants you to help him fix it. In “Republic, Lost,” he tells you how.