Home for Less Expo

Home for Less Expo

There are 8,000 to 15,000 homeless citizens currently residing in our province according to a study by Simon Fraser University. This number is considerably up from the 2005 Homeless Count. Every night, a large percentage of homeless citizens have no place to go and end up sleeping outside with little or no protection from harsh natural conditions and social environment.

British Columbians spend the least per person on subsidized housing in Canada (1), which results in a disproportion of supply and demand.

The Mountain Pine Beetle Epidemic in BC has created an overabundance of harvested timber that BC’s wood-product industry is currently unable to utilize. This is the context that third year Industrial Design students of Emily Carr Institute
(ECI), and Wood Manufacturing students from the University of British Columbia’s (UBC) Centre for Advanced Wood Processing (CAWP) program, faced during their 15-week project.

The students were divided into small multidisciplinary groups and were given a task of designing a 64 sq. ft. self-contained living
environment for a cost of $1,500. These prefabricated wood frame homes, would be manufactured in components in a factory and
assembled on location using simple connectors.

An important project criterion included that 30% of the building components should be outsourced from recycled/reused materials, reducing costs and exemplifying sustainable practices in new and creative ways.

The student groups conducted research by interviewing homeless citizens, directors of shelters and different support agencies, which gave them the necessary knowledge to develop a solution for this socially challenging issue. After this the teams fabricated full-scale homes to validate their designs and to initiate a dialogue with the general public and political leaders.

1 The Wellesley Institute National Housing Report Card

For more information, please see the attached file.