A Construction Handbook Redesign I did for Techo Guatemala
In 2018, while living back in my hometown, I did a lot of volunteer work for Techo, including completely redesigning this construction manual for building emergency shelters, of which we built several hundred.
I started off as a volunteer and fresh Architecture grad. There had been a recent eruption by the Volcan de Fuego near the city, so I volunteered to help build houses for the community. We could build around one house with seven volunteers working for three days. However, it was really hard to follow the instructions so that unskilled volunteers could finish a project. My first ask was to help redesign the instruction manual for people with limited experience with construction to know how to build a house. I did not design the emergency shelters and I did not design the process for building the house. What I did was codify the instructions after learning how to build it myself into a guide that could be dispatched and replicated.
The single biggest challenge is how to take well-meaning volunteers that wanted to do something and give them the tools to actually execute. The catch is that you know that they will not stay around long-term. How do you simplify construction?
We had to focus our efforts on different parts of the process. We didn't have much time as we were going to start building soon while we collected all the materials. And we had a decent gauge of which were the parts that tended to get people confused. So we focused on those parts.
The Final Outcome
Beyond the 180 houses that we know we constructed for this initiative, this was used to continue providing instructions for building temporary relief shelters for years afterwards. This was one of the most meaningful pieces of design work that I have had the privilege to work on.