design activism

Interdisciplinary Collaboration: Iquitos, Peru (final)

For the final project of a collaborative design class, I teamed up with a group that had designed a floating chicken coop for the midterm. For the final, we expanded on that concept and proposed a floating community center (one of the primary citizen requests), with floating farms to make use of compost from all that chicken poop. We also had hand washing stations that used collected rain water, which I proposed piping under the river as a way to culturally and literally warm it. There is a cultural aversion to drinking rainwater, as all bad things come from the sky, and all good things from the river. Piping the rain below the water, without letting the clean water actually contact the highly contaminated river, would be a way of acknowledging the cultural heritage of the large indigenous population, while also addressing a primary vector for disease.

 

1-Chicken BNB

 

2-Chicken BNB

Interdisciplinary Collaboration: Iquitos, Peru (midterm)

A team project looking into possibilities for power generation in a floating, informal settlement called Claverito, in Iquitos, Peru. The format of the class is Landscape Architects teamed up with students from other disciplines (like me, Environmental Science), to collaborate on solutions that improve the ecological and human health for this community. The below is what I worked on for the midterm, with the final over here.

The people currently use makeshift power cables patched into the municipal grid, combined with kerosene generators and kerosene lamps. It’s all very dangerous and polluting, so my team looked for alternatives. We initially looked into hydropower, but section of Amazon tributary they live on is fairly stagnant. Our solutions:

  1. Follow literoflight.org‘s example to provide interior lighting during the day.
  2. Use a GravityLight, which residents could possibly build themselves from scrap parts (except for low-wattage LED bulbs, which would need to be shipped in).
  3. PotatoLights for supplemental energy.

Cooked potatoes produce more electricity than raw, it turns out. I was able to get mine to produce enough to make a tiny red LED light up. Not enough to really do any good, but a neat proof of concept.

potato light lit

 

potato light complete

Team-member Russ made a functional GravityLight:

gravity light demo

 

And team-member Sharon made some lovely boards:

gravity light board 1

gravity light board 2layout midterm