Design for Our Future Selves awards 2005
concrete canvas
Peter Brewin and Will Crawford / Industrial Design Engineering
Winner of the Helen Hamlyn Award for creativity
Project description
Concrete Canvas is a hardened emergency shelter that weighs only 230kg. It can be deployed by one unskilled person in under 40 minutes and is ready for use in 12 hours. It can be delivered sterile enabling previously impossible surgical procedures to be performed in situ. It enables hardened, weatherproof buildings to be erected from the first day of a crisis such as a natural disaster. The build time and minimal resources needed to construct it ensures an exceptionally rapid response time.
Key features
Concrete Canvas enables humanitarianagencies to function more effectively from the start of a crisis by providing the following:
- A sterile, hardened environment in which to conduct medical procedures, which would not be possible in a tent
- A secure store for equipment and food, that provides protection from theft and termites
- A field headquarters from which to co-ordinate operations.
By enabling a hardened structure from the start of a crisis, Concrete Canvas provides a single stage solution. Currently, tents are used as initial buildings but they become rapidly worn out and damaged and have to be replaced by a hardened building.
Research methods
- Field work research trip to Uganda for one month.
- Interviews with 23 UN Agencies and NGOs
- Visits to IDP (Internally Displaced Persons) settlements in the Gulu and Lira regions, where the LRA (Lords Resistance Army) are still highly active, highlighted first-hand the conditions and requirements of displaced persons and refugees
- Interviews with ground workers, refugees and examination of their current shelters
- Experience of the ‘pipeline’ used to bring supplies to camps.
- Full scale prototype testing and field testing with an NGO.
Target users
The United Nation agencies and NGOs who operate in disaster relief.