Failures

Category: Failures

22 June, 2015

Arkitrek Handbook 2014 Download Avaliable

Arkitrek’s Camps are a learning experience for everyone. During three months of intense designing and building, the Arkitrekkers leave having made many mistakes, even more successes and a huge body of knowledge about sustainable construction. The only problem is they often leave without sharing these lessons with the next set of Arkitrekkers.

So last year the Tagul Hut design team went about writing a handbook. Within 120 pages, the handbook details everything that the design team learned during their stay with Arkitrek. The team tirelessly illustrated every page and translated the book into English and Malay. The handbook covers each stage of construction including, information on Biocrete, Bamboo and Earthbag construction.

This book is intended as an open source educational tool and we hope to increase the book’s body of knowledge during our future camps. The handbook is the starting point for the Arkitrek wiki site. (coming soon) In the meantime, if you have any information that you would like to put forward, please don’t hesitate to contact the Arkitrek team.

Download Arkitrek Handbook 2014 Here

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22 March, 2014

Arkitrek Guide to Working for Free

Would you like to know how to piss off all your clients, lower the esteem of your company and ensure that your staff don’t stick around? Try working for free. Working for free can bite you on the bum, but like many animals with sharp teeth it can also give you a warm fluffy feeling, new friends, loyalty and inspiration. Here’s our guide to avoiding the teeth, learned painfully.

Your motives for working for free may include: for kudos, to attract and retain staff, to build your portfolio and to create business opportunities. If you’re retired or have an alternative source of income, you may have other motivations, but we’re not and don’t, so won’t deal with those motives.

The most obvious way for free work to backfire is that others will expect you to work for free too. Everyone loves a discount and hates it if someone else got a discount when they didn’t. Trying to define who is eligible to receive free work, based on worthiness, is only going to get you into more trouble.

The next biggy, more like a poison barb, is that you may not only be doing yourself a disservice by working for free. “We sometimes forget that work is never performed in a vacuum; it is always done within an existing economic system upon which some people depend” points out Joe O’Connell of Creative Machines. Your free work could take away someone else’s supper.

One way to muffle the backfire would be not to tell anyone that you’re working for free, but if you can’t brag about your selfless devotion to a worthy cause how do you claim the kudos? In reality, we’ve found that kudos might not come to you anyway. If you value your work at zero or very little, there is a real risk that the person you’re working for will also value your work at zero or very little.

The opposite can also be true. “The best decision we ever made was to raise our prices” Norm van’t Hoff of Sarinbuana Eco Lodge told me once, Norm explained that just raising their prices radically changed how people valued their services. They went from a fringe hippy hangout to luxury boutique eco-resort, almost overnight.

Finally, you might find that your staff might lose interest once that magnificent project for the public good, which you only got because you agreed to work for free, has finished and the real work begins.

These are the pitfalls of pro-bono work and we have experienced all of them. Unfortunately, we didn’t find out about an initiative by Public Architecture called The One Percent until all our mistakes had been made. In their Pro Bono Design Handbook for Designers Public Architecture explain how pro-bono work ‘enhances the profession’s engagement with the under-resourced communities most in need of the benefits of design’. They go on to codify why and how you should work for free. Read it, it will save me some writing.

The secrets of how to work for free, effectively, all lie in our mistakes that I described above.

1. Everyone else will want us to work for free.

We approach this issue, not by defining who gets pro-bono work, but what pro-bono work is available. Having said that, we do define who does not get pro-bono work. Pro Bono means ‘for the public good’ so we won’t work pro-bono for private clients or privately owned companies.

In 2013 Arkitrek contributed 28% of our total fee income in pro-bono services. This is not a sustainable level for us. The One Percent works on a contribution of at least 1%, obviously. Whatever the contribution level is, potential beneficiaries must know that they’re competing for a limited pot.

We have also found that time can be a handy excluder: You want fast? You pay. You want pro-bono? Here is our timeline.

2. Pro-bono values our work, and therefore other people’s similar work, at zero or very little.

Pro-bono work has exactly the same value, and liability, as paying work, we just don’t charge for it. This is the golden rule that we learned from Public Architecture: Always invoice for the value of your work, even if the ‘amount due after pro-bono contribution’ is zero.

Take every opportunity to impress upon your pro-bono client and their partners, exactly how much your service is worth. In this way you can actually increase awareness in the market of the value of your services. You don’t get this opportunity with paying clients because they might not appreciate you running around telling everyone how much they are paying you.

3. My staff are only interested in the pro-bono projects.

We allow student volunteers to lead many of our pro-bono projects and our paid staff support them. The Taproot Foundation has written a report on the emerging trend for Pro-bono in American professional schools in which they note that “The primary driver of these trends has been the demand among students for socially conscious careers.”

Arkitrek has found this to be true. Every single Malaysian who has worked with us has been exceptionally talented and they were all motivated to work for us by the ethics of our company. Attracting and retaining talent is one of the greatest reasons for design companies to do pro-bono work.

Arkitrek has taken this principle to the next level by developing a training programme that has such high value for design students that they’re prepared to pay to participate in our pro-bono projects.

Remember how this article started with the ‘pro-bono as a sharp toothed fluffy animal’ metaphor? In British culture there is a saying: ‘hair of the dog that bit you’. This means that you can fix a problem by applying a small quantity of the causative agent: usually the ingestion of alcohol to cure a hangover. We’ve applied hair of the dog to our pro-bono problems and we’re now getting on just fine. We won’t be over-indulging in pro-bono work in future but it will certainly always be a part of our company ethos.

2 September, 2013

When the Architect Fails to Check the Engineer’s Drawings

When the architect doesn’t check the engineer’s drawings this is what happens: The truss is supposed to sit comfortably on the post on the left. Lesson learned: Don’t trust other people to do their job properly. Luckily we were able to rescue the situation with some on-site welding and a minor adjustment to the ceiling detailing. No one will ever know!

26 August, 2013

Fakta Fakta Kelemahan & Kelebihan Kayu Pokok Kelapa

Using coconut wood in construction of community based construction projects can be a sustainable choice but requires careful design and project management. In our Tinangol Community Centre we failed to continually inform and seek consent to use coconut wood throughout the 3 year construction process. We started off with full consent but practical blunders and protracted construction process eroded support to the point where the community insisted that all coconut posts be replaced with hardwood.

The situation was created by the fact that we had not considered the construction sequence when designing for coconut posts. The slow pace of building on this project resulted in our coconut posts being left standing in the rain for over a year. This may have accelerated decay in the coconut posts to the extent that most of them need replacing.

Luckily we anticipated that the coconut posts may not last as long as other parts of the building and therefore designed them to be easily replaceable. We expect that the replacement posts, now safely protected from the rain, will last for ten years or longer.

Lessons learned:
1. Consider construction sequence when using innovative materials
2. Ensure that building clients are informed of and consent to innovations
3. Educate people in characteristics of unfamiliar materials
4. Don’t be scared to condemn building materials that are no longer fit for purpose

The following poster was prepared by Arkitrek intern, Mohd. Kassim Hashim, to help inform the locals at Kg Tinangol about the use of coconut posts and win back their consent and confidence in coconut posts as a sustainable building material.

1 September, 2010

Not so much as a fart of Biogas

You will recall from my earlier post that we have been building a biogas digester at Camp Tinangol with Camps International.

The aim of this prototype was to test whether a biogas digester could be built using unskilled labour, such as gap year students on a Camps International trip. We based our design on the well documented Deenbandhu model with a ferro-cement fixed dome for storing gas under water pressure.

Camps International are also working with us on a second digester at the Bornean Sun Bear Conservation Centre (BSBCC)

Our results to date have been inconclusive because the BSBCC digester is still under construction and at Tinangol, although complete, the digester has failed at the testing and commissioning stage.

Reasons for the failure at Tinangol are due perhaps not surprisingly to poor workmanship. The body of the digester was not watertight and the fixed dome was not air tight.

An important lesson that we learned is that it’s better to test a digester with water and a compressor first before you fill it with shit!

A week or so after filling the Tinangol digester with ‘fuel’ the camp residents reported a foul smell and grey water seeping up through the ground at the perimeter of the digester. We had to pump all the shit out and flush the digester twice with fresh water before it was clear to dig out around the digester back to slab level and pour an extra skin of concrete around the entire thing to block the multiple leaks.

With water-tightness rectified and tested satisfactorily we turned our attention to testing for air leakage. We did this by hiring a compressor (the type used by builders to power nail guns) and pushing an air hose down the displacement tank and into the body of the digester so that we could fill the dome with air.

Using a home made ‘U’ tube pressure gauge we sat back and waited to see whether the digester would hold the 10cm static head of water pressure that we had pumped in.

The pressure deflated faster than a whoopee cushion under a fat man’s arse.

With reference to a schoolboy trick for locating bicycle tyre punctures we coated the digester dome and gas pipes with a viscous washing-up-liquid solution and pressurised it again. By this method we quickly located gas leaks in the pipes that distribute biogas to the kitchen stove. These leaks were easy to fix with some extra plumbing tape and a silicon gun but the ferro-cement dome stubbornly refused to reveal the location of other leaks.

The digester still would not hold pressure.

We tried testing the dome at different pressure levels to see if we could isolate how far up the dome was the point of leakage. This made no difference except that at higher pressures the deflation curve was not uniform. There would be a fast initial deflation followed by a slower rate and then it would speed up again. Bubbles of air also appeared in the water in the displacement tank although we knew from the pressure gauge that the level of air in the dome was well above its underflow level at the displacement tank opening.

Our conclusion from these tests was that there were multiple points of leakage and that some leaks may be being transferred from one place to another through interstitial cavities in the ferro-cement dome and brickwork of the displacement tank.

We were not able to pinpoint the location of any of the leaks.

As the digester had already received multiple additional coatings of cement plaster we decided that it wasn’t worth putting on an extra layer to try to stop the invisible leaks.

Our strategy now is to wait until the BSBCC digester is finished and put that through the same tests. Being our second digester (more experience) and a little larger (easier working access) the quality of plastering work on this Mark II Prototype is a lot better than the first.

Meanwhile the effluent pipes in the Tinangol digester have been modified so that it can function as a normal septic tank.

If the BSBCC digester also proves to be incapable of storing not so much as a fart of methane we will look at an alternative biogas digester design; most likely with a floating gas holder where the use of prefabricated HDPE or fibreglass would more or less guarantee air-tightness.

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