We had the distinct pleasure to interview award winning designer Abel Gómez Morón Santos about their original and creative Ecological Housing design work. Abel Gómez Morón Santos is an award-winning industrial designer, that makes our world a better place with their original ecological housing works.
Abel Gómez Morón Santos ("AGMS") answered Design Interview ("DI") questions about their award-winning work Plastidobe Ecological Housing. Interview questions prepared by Frank Scott.
AGMS : The idea was to create an inexpensive, environmentally friendly, self-assembled housing system. Peru was recently devastated by a series of floods that left around 700,000 people homeless. It is because of this that we decided to do our best trying to design the solution to this problem, taking into account sustainability and ease of transportation.
AGMS : Our focus was mainly on the sustainability aspect and the ease both for transportation and assembly. Things such as resistance to climatological conditions were also taken into account, but this was the obvious part. Our goal was to excel in environmental friendliness and construction. And we achieved that by creating a unique self-assembled block system that has recycled plastic on the outside, and dirt on the inside.
AGMS : We want to start manufacturing these and figure out the best way to get these to settlers in rural areas. But also, we’ve been working on the second version of this system which will introduce some improvements in every area of the design.
AGMS : We started the development on January 2017, and we have been working on it ever since.
AGMS : We decided to do this because as designers we have a moral responsibility of trying to solve problems of today. And because of the recent floods that affected Peru, we decided it was time to do something, and we decided to tackle this problem doing what we love: designing.
AGMS : We have yet to decide the business strategy to get this product to the people we are targeting. But we somehow want to get this to the people as soon as possible.
AGMS : We are targeting all the low-resource people that live in rural areas.
AGMS : Unlike other sustainable, modular, self-assembled housing systems, this one presents the idea of a bio-structure, because the main columns are an alfalfa root, and therefore the most abundant material is simply dirt. All this encaged in a recycled plastic structure. We also thought a lot about packaging for ease of transportation since this is aimed at rural areas.
AGMS : It comes of the combination of Plastic and Adobe. Adobe is the material from which most of the houses are built in Peru, these are not well-build houses so we decided to give it an update using recycled plastic thats why we get this new thing called: Plastidobe.
AGMS : Working on this project was mostly digital, therefore what was mostly used was computers, as well as iPads and iPhones for lighter tasks and research.
AGMS : From the workflow to the creation itself, technology is the reason all of this is possible. This goes from getting instant information that would later inspire us, to the possibilities of a plastic recycling plant. It is a wonderful time to be live and we should use all of the technologies available in our advantage. But there is something special with this project, and that is that we focused also in ancient technologies from the Inca empire such as the trapezoidal constructions. Without the iPad making this would’ve been harder, but, what sets apart this project is that we focused on technologies that have been lost or forgotten, but are by no means outdated.
AGMS : In the 21st century it’s impossible not to think in a big global scale. We knew this project had a lot of potential, that’s why we decided to promote it and see how the world could help us make it a reality.
