Burning Village: Deployable, Scalable, Open Source Camp Infrastructure for Burning Man

Abstract

Burning Man Camps are wildly variable, highly unpredictable, and extremely individualized, temporary autonomous communities existing within the larger decentralized network that is Burning Man. However, this chaotic network is built on top of a highly systematized framework – both physical in terms of its location and city planning, and cultural in terms of its ethos & principals. The open framework of Burning Man becomes a venue for the actualization of its participant’s creative visions. This semi-modular, decentralized, mosaic relies on its participants to make the event what it is, and ultimately the nuanced layering of the efforts of various disparate camps make Black Rock City the rich, and vibrant city that it is (albeit for only 1 week out of the year). My goal is to design a set of digital tools and a structural framework that can used, co-opted, and expanded on by a group of empowered users to design and fabricate deployable, scalable, open source infrastructural trailers for their Burning Man camps. Because of the number of radically different programmatic requirements within each camp and the unique physical & cultural environment of the event itself, a top down, one-size-fits-all solution is bound to have limited applicability. However, by utilizing parametric modeling, an open source communal design ethos, and digital fabrication tools it is possible to design flexible, mass customizable, and individualized structures for Burning Man camps which are more closely aligned with the principals of the event. In the way that Burning Man shifts the way we think about society, we can shift the way we think about the design process from a workflow consisting of a top-down visionary delivering a static product to a ground up and communal network of empowered users working within a systematized framework, acting as a canvas for the individual to realize their personal vision through community action.