On September 8, 2008 at the Ars Electronica digital media festival in Linz, Austria, 170 people from fields spanning business, culture, arts and technology gathered at Mission Future to explore the power and potential of open innovation and collaboration. Under the theme „We’re Open“, participants spent the day immersed in presentations, panels, interviews, breakout sessions, Future Slams, a Future Hunt, music and interactive art.

Over 25 speakers lead discussion, sharing their expertise and opinions on topics including the future of intellectual property, open source, crowd-funding, social networking, the future of creation, open community, open business and open arts. Over the coming weeks and months we’ll be posting video clippings and summaries of Mission Future 2008 sessions on the Mission Future website, so visit http://missionfuture.trendpool.com/ to find out what went on.

An enormous amount of gratitude is due to all the speakers for sharing their foresights and insights with us, and equally sincere thanks go to our participants, whose contributions were key to the success of the day, to Ars Electronica Linz for their support in realizing this first major undertaking of Mission Future, and to our sponsors, the Berlin School of Creative Leadership, Weingüter Retzer Land, Art Directors Club, Red Bull, Carpe Diem, Linz 09, Indigo, Der Standard, Linz Tourism, Groupile and rebell.tv.

Building on the success of the 2008 event, the goals for Mission Future 2009 are now far loftier. We intend to receive speakers of the same high calibre as those we were privileged to hear this year, to tap into the knowledge and experience of participants to even greater effect, and to further advance Mission Future’s initiative to create tomorrow’s economy.

(Photo: Oswald Schröder, Elizabeth Stark and Joichi Ito discuss the future of intellectual property. Credit: Ars Elelctronica)

ines schwotzer is a jewelry and accessory designer who lives and works in the small town of feilitzsch,
germany. she has worked as a freelance designer since 1995, creating her own pieces and working for
the likes of fashion house chanel. many of her works are done in stainless steel using non-tradition
technique she learned through textile background. using thin wire, schwotzer weaves and braids the
metal to create delicate works that contrast the coldness of the material.

http://www.schwotzer-design.de

Dr. Owen Geiger and I have just found that a book published in 1990 in Germany, Building with Pumice, written by Klaus Grasser and Gernot Minke, describes experiments done in the 1970’s at the Research Laboratory for Experimental Building at Kassel Polytechnic College in Germany that have considerable bearing on the history of earthbag building.

Most of the book is about the physical properties of pumice, how to obtain and process it, and how to make blocks or walls with pumice/cement, but the fifth and final chapter, titled “Building with Unbonded Pumice,” describes how they began to investigate the question of how natural building materials like sand and gravel could be used for building houses without the necessity of using binders. The use of fabric-packed bulk material was found to be a cost-efficient approach. They used pumice to pack in the bags, because it weighs less and has better thermal insulating properties than ordinary sand and gravel. Their first successful experiments were with corbeled dome shapes (an inverted catenary) which was obtained with the aid of a rotating vertical template mounted at the center of the structure.

1978, a prototype house using an earthquake-proof stacked-bag type of construction was built in Guatemala. They used cotton bags soaked in lime-wash to protect the material from rot and insects. When flattened, the bags measured roughly 8 X 10 cm. Vertical bamboo poles placed on both sides of the bags and interconnected with wire loops gave the stacked bags stability. The bamboo rods were fixed to the foundation and to the horizontal tie beam at the top.

Obviously the concept of constructing homes with fabric bags of mineral material predates Nader Khalili’s earliest experiments by many years, and I was certainly not the first to experiment with filling earthbags with pumice! The entire chapter is reproduced as an article at www.greenhomebuilding.com.