Situating shelter design and provision in ICT discourse for scarce-resource contexts

Abstract

The world is facing a shelter crisis that is only expected to worsen in the future as resources become scarcer and climate change, economic decline, and mass migrations pervade. In this paper, we argue that the ICT community has a major role to play in the crisis of shelter provision, and we explore the relevant challenges and limitations, as well as the role ICT systems can play to mitigate them. We break shelter provision into four fundamental processes: land procurement, design, construction, and maintenance, and we sketch four research themes to address them. Through specific project examples, we show that the abundant present is the time to use ICT systems to investigate, collect, analyze, develop, test, and preserve a variety of tools, techniques, knowledge bits, construction kits, and algorithms that will guide us in the future to produce shelters with limited design, computing, and construction resources.