Thank you all so much. We're totally amazed that we won - all the people who've worked on the hexayurt over the years, all the people who've donated time, resources, materials, professional consultations - all of us together is how we got this done :-)

Special thanks are due to my extremely patient and utterly wonderful partner in crime, Lindsey Darby, without whom none of this would have worth while. She's been my co-designer and partner for the last year or so on this project, and hopefully we'll see more of her work out in the the open very soon!

We'll be around to answer questions for the next couple of days, and don't forget all the resources we have up on Archive.org.

Thank you so much! This is an honor and totally fabulous. See ya'll on the playa.

Lindsey Darby

Congratulations Vinay & Lindsey. And many thanks for involving us at SleepBreeze Ltd in your work. This is a most worthwhile project and has taken a lot of hard work and persistence on your part to get to this point. You deserve great credit for your initiative.

I hope that this prize raises awareness of your innovation and that we see more Hexayurts springing up around the world.

All the best, Andy

Congratulations! Like Andy I look forward to seeing hexayurts spreading, and being adapted for use, throughout the world.

Hey Andy, with a bit of luck we'll be able to really go through the infrastructure package in detail at some point. The more I work on this thing, the more I feel the infrastructure package and the appliances are the really important bits.

In the slums, all over the world, roughly a billion people live in low quality housing with rough or absent services like running water and electrical power. For those environments, if you are going to have a refrigerator, the conventional design is really expensive and very, very power hungry - we need somebody to design and market a smaller, extremely high efficiency fridge that can operate with interruptions in power flow, perhaps by storing a lot of ice in some kind of internal chamber.

In the same kind of vein, Andy's company, SleepBreeze has designed a little widget with ultra-low power consumption that solves some of the same problems that people usually solve with air conditioning, but they substitute a close understanding of how the human body works for big honking power supply.

I really wish there was a global design competition for devices with less than, say, 10 watts of power consumption, or self-powered devices. It would produce a lot of progress for not much cost.

Hi Lonny! Thank you! (Lonny's one of our hosts at Appropedia. He and the gang have been helping us get the Wiki pages on the hexayurt together, and integrating with other projects like OLPC.

This is somewhat reminscient of, though simpler in design and construction than, Buckminster Fuller's Dymaxion Deployment Unit (1944) (sheet | frame). Of course this is in turn, derivative of the ancient idea of a yurt, which, like Fuller's geodesic structures, have passive cooling properties.

I'm embarrassed to say that I only discovered the DDU in the last couple of months. I felt a little silly at first, then realized that it simply meant I was on the right track - the one Bucky had walked 60 years before!

There's no shame in being 60 years behind a guy who was 300 years in the future. :-) I hope... hahaha.

I'm confused... isn't Polyisocyanurate produced from petroleum based plastic? That is NOT cool. Let me know when they make em out of carbohydrates not hydrocarbons.

Jordan,

You can make hexayurts out of a variety of materials, including hexacomb cardboard, which is quite environmentally benign. Polyisocyanurate is easy to find and very durable (if it has heavy foil facers) and can be a superior choice in locations where the energy saved by the insulation saves more environmental impact than the manufacture of the boards.

If you are interested in the details, please drop me a line.

Vinay