Walking House

What if the next time you needed to move, you simply picked up your house and took it with you? Unlike a traditional mobile home, however, the Copenhagen-based collective N55's Walking House (built in conjunction with MIT) doesn't need a road. This "modular dwelling system," commissioned by the Wysing Arts Centre, is said to be a re-design -- and unique interpretation -- of an 18th century horse-drawn carriage.

To me, Walking House resembles a giant ant, with its six autonomous legs and hexagonal, tubular body. The unit is equipped with a "composting toilet system", solar cells, and small windmills. Its inventors say that this design "enables persons to live a peaceful nomadic life, moving slowly through the landscape or cityscape with minimal impact on the environment."

You can watch the YouTube video (below) of Walking House, but the speed is so slow that the clip is almost unwatchable. The house moves at a snail's pace of 60 meters per hour (0.037 miles per hour or about 4/100 of a mile per hour), which seems to fall short of the designer's intent to have the house "move at a slow pace similar to the walking speed of the human body."

Nonetheless, there's a lot to love about this little ant-like house. treehugger has been following this project from its inception, and it's fun to see how the project has evolved from prototype until now.

As a temporary dwelling, Walking House truly takes the fun of a treehouse to another level. But I can't imagine living full-time in such a structure. What do you think? Could you live in Walking House? If you were going to design a walking house, what would it look like?

Give yourself a chance to fail

Yesterday was a bad day for me and science. First of all, I forgot to write my Monday post -- oops! Sorry about that.

Then, there was the science experiment.

My son got a kit for Christmas for growing sugar crystals. Part of this kit consists of little, sugar-seeded sticks. You suspend them in a sugar solution and then supposedly, over time, the sugar crystals "grow" on the sticks.

Well, we never got that far. The kit came with one (count it, one) package of super-special sugar that was supposed to grow super-special big crystals. It claimed to be pure sucrose, although the box itself admitted to sugar and egg in the ingredient mix.

To make a long story short, I burned the solution. Everything was going swimmingly, the sugar was dissolving in the water I was heating -- turning the solution from murky to clear -- when things began to boil and the solution went all frothy and bubbly. The bag clearly stated that if you overheated things, no crystals would grow.

Why? My husband, the kindly Itinerant Cryptographer, figures that I denatured the protein from the egg. I'm wondering if I somehow managed to bind the egg protein to the sugar. Otherwise, what difference would it make?

But the frustrating part of the experiment was that there was no going back. I was given exactly one bag of special sugar -- one chance to get it right.

I think too much of science education is presented this way. We believe that if we fail one test or struggle with one subject, we are bad at science. And science is all about embracing failure.

Think of Thomas Edison, the American inventor who held over 1,000 patents for things like the light bulb and the phonograph. Edison was not afraid of failure, and, by all accounts, didn't see it as something negative. Exactly how many times did Edison fail? The numbers may vary, but you can bet it was a lot.

"Invention is ninety-nine percent perspiration, and one percent inspiration," Edison is quoted as saying. His quirky enthusiasm and willingness to try anything is captured in this fascinating article, The Undiscovered World of Thomas Edison by Kathleen McAuliffe in Atlantic Monthly. She writes of one incident in his lab:

" ... Edison and his colleagues behaved with the goofy abandon of high school kids set loose in chemistry class. Searching for a liquid with specific properties for an electrochemical device, they tried caraway oil, clove oil, oregano oil, nitrogen chromate, and peppermint oil. But as night stretched on into the wee hours of the morning, they adopted a more freewheeling approach. The next notebook entry records that they tested coffee, eggs, sugar, and milk ..."

So, maybe I should try that sugar experiment again. This time, I'll make my own sugar mix, using light brown sugar, dark brown sugar, table sugar, Easter candy ...