Marcin Jakubowski, who has recently been selected as a Senior TED fellow for 2012 – 2013, began a KickStarter campaign for the Global Village Construction Set (GVCS) – a modular, DIY, low-cost, open source, high-performance platform that allows for the easy fabrication of the 50 different industrial machines that it takes to build a small, sustainable civilization with modern comforts.
The aim of the GVCS is to lower the barriers to entry into farming, building, and manufacturing. Its a life-size lego set that can create entire economies, whether in rural Missouri, where the project was founded, or in the developing world.
Excerpt from the Global Village Construction Set KickStarter campaign page:
So Far we’ve prototyped 8 of the 50 Machines and we’ve been expanding rapidly. We are 100% crowd-funded. We have 400 True Fans that support our work monthly.
What Makes the Global Village Construction Set so special?
Open Source– we freely publish our 3d designs, schematics, instructional videos, budgets, and product manuals on our open source wiki and we harness open collaboration with contributors.
Low-Cost– The cost of making or buying our machines are, on average, 8x cheaper than buying from an Industrial Manufacturer, including an average labor cost of $15 hour for a GVCS fabricator and using mail-order parts.
Modular– Motors, parts, assemblies, and power units can interchange.
User-Serviceable – Design-for-disassembly allows the user to take apart, maintain, and fix tools readily without the need to rely on expensive repairmen.
DIY – The user gains control of designing, producing, and modifying the GVCS tool set.
Closed Loop Manufacturing – Metal is an essential component of advanced civilization, and our platform allows for recycling metal into virgin feedstock for producing further GVCS technologies – thereby allowing for cradle-to-cradle manufacturing cycles
High Performance – Performance standards must match or exceed those of industrial counterparts for the GVCS to be viable.
Flexible Fabrication – It has been demonstrated that the flexible use of generalized machinery in appropriate-scale production is a viable alternative to centralized production.
Open Business Models – We encourage the replication of enterprises that derive from the GVCS platform as a route to truly free enterprise – along the ideals of Jeffersonian democracy.
Industrial Efficiency – In order to provide a viable choice for a resilient lifestyle, the GVCS platform matches or exceeds productivity standards of industrial counterparts.
Why should I help fund this project?
This Kickstarter push is aimed at the full testing, publishing, and deployment of the construction toolkit – the Tractor, Compressed Earth Brick Press, Soil Pulverizer, and Hydraulic Power Unit.
This toolkit will establish a new high benchmark of efficiency for green, low-cost housing construction – making natural building FAST and CHEAP, rather than SLOW and EXPENSIVE. During field testing, we aim to demonstrate $5 per sq. foot building costs, while staying within industry standard construction schedules.
The library of instructional material that we produce will make replication a straightforward task. A first time fabricator with 3 days of training will be able to build this toolkit – empowering this individual to transform the dirt beneath their feet into the material needed to construct a home, school, store, hospital, office, etc… (see more)