14 DAY TRIAL // Starting a new construction project can have more severe consequences than you expect, especially if many homeless people live in the area you've requisitioned. And that's not even counting the situations where you need to persuade people to move away.
Alastair Pryor learned this the hard way when it was working as a “tradie” that built scaffolding. He was working on a construction site in Melbourne CBD, you see, during winter once, and disturbed a homeless man while he was at it.
It was a pretty spontaneous thing, all told. He was drilling one morning (well, he and his coworkers were) and he woke up a homeless man that was sleeping below him.
It made him think of how bad the conditions he lived in were, so he got the idea to make a shelter that was easy to carry around and deploy anywhere.
One thing led to another and he eventually expanded his idea to include disaster relief, or any aid relief on both a local and an international scale. So his shelter evolved from a one-person to a four-person tent of sorts.
Normally, it takes some doing before you finally figure out how to set up a tent properly. There's a reason that people use the lack of skill in such things as comic relief in movies about camping.
The Compact Shelter promises not to be hard to deploy at all. Instead, it can be pulled up and spread on the floor or ground in under 2 minutes.
There's another thing: one Compact Shelter (that's the name that Pryor chose) is modular. Which isn't to say that it's made of multiple pieces, but that it, itself, can become a piece of a larger whole. You see, it can be connected to others like it, creating larger dwellings or two separate rooms.
But you're no doubt wishing you knew a bit more about the tent/shelter itself, so here's the gist of it: it's a shelter that measures 2 x 2 x 2 meters when fully erect (6.5 x 6.5 x 6.5 feet), but collapses down to 200 x 150 x 7 cm / 79 x 40 x 2.75 inches. All in all, it weighs 16 kilograms, which is about the same as 35 lbs.
The main material is polypropylene, a durable, weather-resistant substance that can isolate heat as well (as in, allows warmth to gather within). The shelter has been found suitable to all weather conditions in fact, even those in strong wind (although tornadoes and hurricanes are still a no-no). Conversely, as cool air enters through the base of the shelter, warm air is expelled out via the ridge line, so you won't suffocate either.
Finally, the price of $150 per unit means that campers could find a great use for it too, not just aid relief organizations. You can even mount it as an outdoor structure in the backyard, during a pool party.
