Transcript: Going BOLD - Open Source in the Built Environment with Marcin Jakubowski

Hello, I'm Brittany Campbell Turner, and this is the Constructor Podcast, session number nine. Hello, and welcome to this episode of Constructor. This podcast is dedicated to helping property owners have certainty in their decisions about the construction projects. I want to help property owners foster trusting relationships in your project teams, help you understand how to lower risk, be under budget and on scheduling your construction projects and exceed your end user's desires. Hello everyone.

Thank you for joining me today. My guest today is Marcin Jakubowski of the Open Building Institute. He is an open source product developer. His ideas about collaboration blow me out of the water. If you're interested in modular eco homes that can be built in five days for under $25,000 in materials, he is the guy to talk to.

He launched a Kickstarter called the Open Building Institute Eco Building Toolkit, and it ends tomorrow, August 3rd, 2016. If you're listening to this in the future, you can find his Kickstarter link in the show notes. I started off an energizing interview with Marcin really wanting to get an understanding about his passion and philosophy about collaboration. I asked him why open source collaboration is what he subscribes to versus traditional collaboration methods in construction. Listen to his compelling argument.

It's a very important question and a good one to start with. The building industry is in order to optimize that whole system, in order to take the inefficiencies out of that, just like the whole world of business is about removing inefficiencies, just like lean. If you try to do that, you need just an intense amount of information in order to do that. To get that process streamlined to the point where less people can do it, in other words, you have all the intellectual property, all the designs.

Think about the hundred experts that go into building a structure. Open source the content, have the world collaborate and come up with the most ecological, energy efficient, in fact, living building challenge compliant is our goal. Put in all the best features, all knowledge known to date into every new structure today. How does that sound? You can only do that, I believe, by an open source approach where you are truly collaborating and building upon past work.

Does that answer that? Absolutely. I guess part of my question too is what drove you to this idea? What triggered you to determine that this was the best method to collaborate? Talking about lean, there are integrated projects delivery approaches that contractually obligate project teams, and maybe not so much in the residential space, but contractually obligate project teams to work in such a manner, but it does not open source.

I guess the question of you can collaborate without open source. Open source obviously gathers all the ideas from everyone, but I guess why this way versus a... That's an interesting way to frame it. I never really got that question directly, clearly like you have, but the idea is very simple. If you do what you just said, if you have closed collaboration or proprietary collaboration, then that project lasts in the unit of one or within the unit of replication possible by the organization.

If you make it open source, now you reduce the barriers to entry to anyone trying to do that, which simply makes for more innovation, more progress for society, better buildings elsewhere, people not reinventing the wheel when they engage in a project. That approach will therefore include a design for replicability. Think about more robust multipurpose designs. The flexibility is there, so you can take what's already been built, you can riff upon that. Whenever you start a new project, it's cheaper, easier, faster because you're building upon prior open knowledge as opposed to you have to start from scratch all the time.

Does that explain? Yeah, absolutely. That makes a lot of sense. What this sounds like to me is if you're wanting to build in the most efficient way possible, if you're not worried about customizable design, if you're not worried about ... What I mean customizable, I mean different ...

If you want a high finishes approach versus low finishes, a lot of the things that maybe some of these higher end commercial spaces or retail spaces, it sounds like this is very much for residential approach. Is that correct or are you thinking even outside of that? The applications are all the different realms of construction up to skyscrapers. Now we're not doing skyscrapers right now. We're starting with a one story building, then we're moving on to multiple story.

The idea is that we're talking about a methodology and it can be applied to anything. Now it's not limited to dedicated design because the construction set approach where you have the actual downloadable parts allow you to have complete control over the modification. In fact, that's the precise reason why we're going to do that. All the architects in the world ... Actually, because the number of architects in the world should literally be equal to the number of people because the people who are the best stakeholders who are most closely related to a project.

And so everyone, we believe that the closer the owner is to that build process, the design process, the better the product will be. So once again, it's like to be brash about this, the future of any enterprise is open source. From our perspective, it's somewhat our deep belief, but we simply see that the next economy is the open source economy simply because it allows for the efficiencies that are simply not possible when you're trying to keep your stuff behind wraps. You cannot get access to the best talent because whoever you are ...

And I think you actually said, did you say that on your blog? Whoever you are, all the talent is outside of your organization, no matter who you are. Most of the talent is still going to be outside. So why not avail that talent by being public interest, open source, and that's our key. We simply say to these subject matter experts, hey, help us.

We're doing this cool thing for the world. Everyone benefits, and we get to tap top talent at free or low cost. I think you're blowing my ... I got to be honest. You're blowing my idea of collaboration out of the water.

Even though I know open sourcing, crowdfunding, all of this exists today. Just given where we are with the traditional methods of construction, it really, really pushes the limit on truly valuing what people can provide from a design standpoint. And even constructability standpoint, workflow standpoint, all of these things, we truly can tap into the value that people are able to give. And it really, truly excites me. Like I said, it's blowing me out of the water, but I love it, and I'm excited about it.

No, this is great. I mean, you nailed it. You said democratize ... Well, facilitate democratize. Three things, there's design, constructability, and workflow.

There's huge efficiencies to be made when that process is integrated. And that's exactly our learnings, and that's how we're able to build houses in five days when it would take you 30 days or three months. We compress, we optimize the designs, we optimize the constructability, meaning design for builds, design for even unskilled people, optimize the workflows, optimize modularity, and you get a better product, cheaper, faster, better kind of deal. Yeah, it's just the next economy. That's our conviction.

I love it. So just giving that we now know what your passion is about collaboration and why it's important to and your overarching kind of belief behind it, tell us about the Open Building Institute, the EcoBuilding Toolkit. Particularly that you are now campaigning for on your Kickstarter campaign. Yeah, three main elements. So one is a core of it is a library of downloadable designs, which are also crowdsourced.

And we're looking at crowdfunded design challenges as a means to crowdsource them. You can download them freely and you can use open source software and right now design basic structures, and we're adding to that library. Second part is an immersion training program for builders such that we can take this wherever to wherever a person is. Say someone doesn't build, they don't want to do an owner build, which is most people in this current economy. I hope that's going to change in the future.

But for those that don't want to build, we provide a turnkey service at a small cost, basically a consulting fee, basically a management fee, facilitation fee above the cost of materials. And the third item is the open source solar powered materials production facility, which means we can produce local local compressed earth block, lumber, bio insulation, concrete from lime, burned lime from local limestone, paint and multi-wall polycarbonate glazing that's 3D printed using a large format 3D printer and charcoal, which is a filter material and fuel for the machines that we are developing because part of this is that we have developed a number of open source construction and utility machines like the brick press or the tractor.

The brick press is pretty much at a fully released state that can allow you to do that. So we're open sourcing not only the build process, but also the machines and building materials. So quick question about the production of the building materials if you're going to do it in a local environment. How do you do that? Do you rent a facility?

How do you do that? Say I wanted to do a space here in the suburbs of Chicago. How would an owner want to like, how would you go through that process? It's our replication model. All of this is founded on the idea that we're promoting the idea of a local construction and we're promoting wide spread replications and the immersion training program will do that, put qualified people to run these facilities.

But basically you start, our growth plan is to train people who then take this to other locations. So we have the open building institute, open source ecology facilities, campuses, which are training and production facilities. So you go to Chicago, you get 40 acres maybe on outskirts and then you can provide the local environment with those local materials right there. So think of instead of having to go to Menards, you're going to be going to this local production facility that can dig its own earth from the site.

If there's a quarry of limestone, we can bake our own limestone to create carbon neutral concrete. As we talk about biomass fueling that whole process. So it's about real land-based facilities that get replicated around the world. Okay, that makes a lot of sense. So it's a matter of acquiring those type of facilities in order to do that type of production.

Starting with demonstrating that building the open source solar powered materials production facility right here, which will be entirely solar run with PV panels. Demonstrate that here on site in the Kansas City area and then replicate that. Awesome. So when are you going to be able to replicate that based upon your plan here? I know you had some timelines.

Timeline is the immersion training program starts in 2017 for a pilot program. And the first replication, I don't know, the build of the facility itself would be next year. So 2018 and after is when we can honestly talk about replications elsewhere, which depend on a lot of the development, the technical development necessary to integrate that kind of a complex package. So basically you're talking about diversified micro factories popping up all over the world. Now to do that requires a lot of integrative know-how, a lot of subject matter expertise.

And that's what we're working on crowdfunding that process, the development of that process. Because a huge part of this, which I didn't really mention the three points of Open Building Institute, the fourth point could be the platform which facilitates this collaborative process. And that's a huge issue right there. It's documentation development platform, scalable one at that, that anyone can use, can fork. Okay.

That definitely gives me a couple of ideas. And I just kind of offline, we can maybe talk about some developers that I know that might be able to help you with that. If they're interested, obviously in investing in the crowdsourcing model, of course. Right. The interesting question would be, how do we invest in that given that it's a, first of all, they'd have to be open to the fact that all the IP goes into the public domain, because this is about making a better world for everyone.

It's not about making money ourselves or maybe doing better for Chicago. It's about fixing the whole world. Understood. And that's what I love about this model here. I'm curious, this platform, it needs to be accessible to people outside of the US.

I'm curious as to what your, if you have any vision here outside of the US as to what this could be. Yes, absolutely. Absolutely. So our growth plan, nominal growth plan, which we're trying to consider seriously is we start with our pilot program of two or four people next year, double that for the next 17 years until there's about 100,000 facilities like this worldwide. So yes, by all means, every country, essentially for every 100,000 population center, could probably support one of these facilities.

That's awesome. I'm just trying to think here. Who do you think is the idealist person to get involved in such a project? Yeah, I think there might be some progressive builders out there that are totally ready for it, but we're just slashing the frontiers on so many areas that it would be someone who's really progressive. It may not be an existing builder.

It might be somebody that we have to train ourselves who is open to the open source method. It's primarily one of the huge challenges is of course the open source culture that the person has to come into when they agree to do this. So we'll see, but I mean, definitely there's a lot of the progressive, eco-conscious entrepreneurial crowd. We're really talking about creating a new breed of social entrepreneur, which we call a movement entrepreneur or a distributive entrepreneur. We call this distributive enterprise.

There's a lot of theory and practice. It's a big package, so we'll see who's going to be able to hack it. In our pilot program, we're going to get some of those answers. Who is our exact profile that we should go for? Okay.

I think your line of thinking is definitely going to evolve. I think that so far that mindset is going to get exactly what you're looking for, especially the more minds that can come together to contribute with that same type of mindset. No, I must say that just the feedback from the Kickstarter campaign and just that live open source discussion, we're just bearing everything. I mean, I don't think you can be more efficient in terms of your R&D method than that. It's constant feedback, constant opportunities.

I've been really pleased that on Kickstarter, the community of people that support you, a lot of them have excellent feedback. We've taken a lot of that, including a couple of people that are going to be collaborators and who are already builders of various projects. That's great. Give us some stats really quick. How much would it take to get a building built?

Okay. Oh yeah. Our current pitch is a 750 square foot structure built under $25,000 in materials loaded with ecological features, does not include land, and the $10,000 service fee or the facilitation fee is what organizes this rapid mass parallel build event as an education experience. It actually gets the house built in five days. That's our nominal figure.

Essentially, we look at it as 250 square foot modules. The first core module with all the utilities is about, it's under 15K. Any other 250 square foot addition, 16 by 16, that will cost you another $4,000 to $5,000. It's very competitive. Basically, you're taking the labor cost out of it and turning it into an asset as an immersion training workshop.

That's one of the major things we need to test out. How replicable is that? People will say, oh, they'll never scale. Well, we have evidence that says it may. The experience has been extremely positive for people who are coming into that as a training, basically an apprenticeship training experience, where they get to experience that whole process.

People are willing to pay for that. People come out being blown away by how powerful they can be in terms of their own productive power. We have really great feedback so far. Yeah, that's great. Either way, you're starting with a $15,000 section that's going to incorporate all your utilities.

You should be able to build off from there depending on how much power, depending on how much heating or cooling energy or plumbing. I can tell you more stats. The core module comes with, it's 3,000 watts of PV power. It's also got its water filtration system so you can actually go from pond or rooftop to potable. It's got a biogas digester that produces gas for cooking.

That would be a world's first to make a replicable system for the temperate zones. People use that in the tropics. We don't use that in the temperate zones yet, but I think it makes sense. We'll see if we can make that a standard option. Okay.

In the event you go outside 750 square feet, is it then something that must be assumed that you may have to replicate this mechanical section? Is it possible that you may be able to extend this photovoltaic power to be able to produce all the energy and also your plumbing, to be able to support the needs? Sorry, can you repeat the question? No worries. I guess this is something that we'll find with the open source design approach.

The idea is that you'll be able to support the rest of the 750 square foot building with this module. If you go outside of that size, that size square footage for the space, then is it a potential then that we should assume that we would have to replicate more energy? Ah yes, I see what you're asking. Yes, that three kilowatts is plenty to support the system for 750 square feet. Now we can have the option for new modules to come with additional PV.

Actually what I mentioned in the $5,000 figure for the additional figures, I believe that that's an extra 700 watts per module. You can add as much as you want for the new ones. You can also increase roof water catchment. I think electrical power is the number one thing. You can definitely expand that.

I don't think people are aware of how ridiculously cheap PV these days is. For anyone who understands, it's under 50 cents a watt. You go to sunelec.com. It's just amazing. The 3,000 watts cost you $1,500 in the solar panels.

No, and I think you're absolutely right. When I was studying photovoltaics back in college, the life cycle cost of purchasing a panel didn't make sense for the amount of energy it produced. That's definitely great knowledge to know that now it's affordable. Now it makes sense for the energy that it produces. To give you a perspective, 10 years ago you are talking about a factor higher price.

I think people are really not aware of this. When I found this out about a year ago, one of our advisors told me about that. I actually couldn't believe it, but it's true. If you look at some of the best places like sunelec.com, it's there. That's awesome.

That's great knowledge to just be aware of these days. I really do encourage any people to actually look at, have a hard look at the numbers, but also recognize that if you have expensive installs, which may be way more on top of that, then it can get hairy in terms of feasibility. Well, it's still feasible, but if you do it in an owner build model or in our model where we provide the whole turnkey build service, we're not charging you for that intense labor. That's part of the system.

We're looking at building integrated photovoltaics as part of our workflow. Okay. That would be a module that you can incorporate. Yeah. Yeah.

Absolutely. Currently we're looking at the roof panels actually incorporating the structural roof panels, incorporating the panels, the PV panels right in them. Okay. So we save ourselves on a layer of sheeting. That's a lot of detail in terms of the water sealing and all of that.

So basically DIY building integrated PV, nobody's really done that. So we have to innovate on that. Very cool. Wow. This is just really exciting.

I'm glad I had the opportunity to talk with you about collaboration and what that means for the industry and where we're going with this. And also about your awesome Kickstarter campaign that seems very promising for the construction model in general. I mean, people like Elon Musk, they seem to think like it's a great idea. And you know what, who of us can say that it's not? I mean, he's brilliant.

So I think this is something certainly to consider in regards to the future. I mean, not just 3D printing or drones or things of that nature. That's just small pieces of technology, but the wisdom that comes along with existing builds is really that special spot that we really need to tap into. And just for numbers, I mean, isn't the global building industry about a trillion dollars or so? Do you know those figures?

I don't know them off the top of my head, but that doesn't sound off. I mean, yeah. Yeah. So yeah. Thanks a lot for doing this interview with me.

Yeah. Thank you, Brittany, for the opportunity. This is great. I'd love to find out more about the lean construction and all the stuff you've got going on. Oh, absolutely.

I hope you enjoyed this interview as much as I did. To find Marchin's Kickstarter campaign, again, it's called the Open Building Institute Eco-Building Toolkit. Go to my show notes at constructor.com slash zero nine to find the link and support. There are lots of options listed there to support. Those of you who are wondering about the Lean Construction Institute and my involvement with lead construction, Marchin happened to mention at the end of the interview, I am on the Congress Planning Committee for the National Congress that's coming up here in Chicago.

It's from October 3rd through 7th, 2016. And you can find more information about the Congress at lcicongress.org. You can learn more about the Institute at leanconstruction.org. To find all the show notes for this interview, once again, go to constructor.com slash zero nine.