Tag Archives: ecology and biodiversity

Solar Sita :: solar cooker engineer

p-sita12.jpg

Sita Bai is one of the Barefoot SolarCooker Engineers. Together with 3 other women she runs the solar-cooker section of the College.
Some years ago she decided to start a 6 months training as solar panel engineer, and she continued her education with a focus on solar cookers.
Today the women are responsible for the construction of the large parabolic dishes, covered with regular pieces of mirror.
They tailor them precisely according to the blueprints of a German Engineer, Wolfgang Scheffler, with whom they still collaborate and improve the reflectors and machinery when needed.
They organise their smithy, weld and solder the mechanical parts for the cookers out of recycled bicycle parts. Their apparatus are sold to organisations in India who use them in community kitchens.

Scheffler’s Community Solar Cooker
Scheffler’s Solar Cooker – pdf

tilonia: the college, the village, the surroundings.

For a video-presentation of the Barefoot College, check the category ‘media’.

Tilonia is a very small village in the middel of the Rajasthan desert, about 650 km south-west of Delhi. Barefoot College was founded here in the early ’70-ties.
What makes it unique and different to all other centres of ‘learning and unlearning’, is its approach: it has devalued and rejected the urban professionals produced by the formal education system.
Over the years it became clear what exactly is unlearnt: the extent to which was underestimated the infinite capacity and competence of the people to identify and solve their own problems, by means of their own skills and mutual trust without relying on strangers’ skills and knowledge from outside.

Nearly three decades ago, the Barefoot People started putting Ghandian ideas into practice, not knowing weather their own ‘Experiments with Truth’ would work because they sounded so simple and yet so difficult.
The basic Gandhian concepts and principles of simplicity and austerity have stood the test of time. People live and eat together. People sit on the floor at Barefoot, and work. People in this College clean their own dishes, sweep their own floors and do voluntary work to keep the Centre clean. Everybody is equal. The ideas, values, humanity and compassion of the people are in focus. The lifestyle of Barefoot College harbours the spirit of a Gandhian ashram.

Interaction with the rural community has taught to respect the natural elements like water and sun. Since 1986 the Barefoot College runs solely on solar energy. Computers, telephone-lines, lighting for residencies and offices, water distribution, laboratory and maternity centre are run on power that comes from the sun. The nightschools for kids are provided with lighting from solar lanterns. Rainwater is collected in underground tanks. No water is wasted. Continue reading

stand-alone PhotoVoltaic-system

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Preparation of the Making Off Stand-Alone Nodes in Meshed networks
Scenario 1: Stand alone PhotoVoltaic-system

Step by Step description by Bartaku.
Date: 2007 12 22.

Vernacular Observation:
Setting up the system coincided with the moment the plants start growing
towards the sun again… winter solstice!

Set up location:
OKNO rooftop, center of brussels (50°50’13” North, 4°22’3″)
Set up time: from 11am to 5pm, with numerous interuptions
(normally feasible with 3 persons in 2hrs max).
Continue reading

mobile architecture

Some musings of Villém Flusser on the freedom of the migrant and new ways of building houses:

Flusser’s ideas about communication and identity have their roots in the concept of recognizing the other through self-determination and self-realization.
Becoming human is achieved through being thrown in an abyss of absurdity an then turning this devastating and painful experience into the liberating task of creating meaning by consciously connecting with self-chosen partners.

Architects must stop thinking geographically and begin to conceptualize topologically.
A house should be conceived of no longer as an artificial cave but rather as a bending in the field of interpersonal relations. A creative house would be a node in the network of interpersonal relations.

The weaving of a secret code, a transformation of adventure into habit and this hallowing of habit remains charged with excitement. The network being woven stays open.
The reversibility of network wiring: no bundled cables, no one-way information.
People would no longer be able to duck and hide, and they would have neither foundation nor support. They would have no other choice but to extend a hand to others.
These mutually open houses would spawn an unimaginable abundance of projects.
They would be networklike switched projectors for alternative worlds that all humankind would hold in common.

(Villém Flusser : The freedom of the Migrant)