Dream House

The Philippines is located in the tropics and frequently suffers with typhoons or tropical cyclones. In a year, approximately 20 tropical cyclones enter the Philippine area of responsibility, while usually ten cyclones are expected to be typhoons, with five having the potential to be destructive ones. There are 20 million rural population, about 4 million households, in the countryside of the Philippines. Most of them live in crude and simple houses, which can’t withstand the damaged caused by typhoons and accompanied floods. For example, during Oct-Nov in 2022, Severe Tropical Storm/Typhoon Nalgae caused 68,422 houses damaged, among which 6,634 ones were totally destroyed, with a significant number of residents injured or dead. Dream House aims at providing an option for helping the rural population in Philippines out of the nightmare of repeated house damage/destruction and rebuilding. Dream House can provide a low-cost typhoon and flood-resistant housing option.

Earthquakes are also natural disasters that often occur in the Philippines. There is no serious consideration of earthquake-resistant mechanisms at all, when rural residents build their houses casually. These houses may collapse easily when they encounter earthquakes. Dream House can offer rural populations a cheap and reliable solution with a skeleton in a solid and simple structure, which is earthquake-resistant and can be assembled by themselves.  

On the other hand, the Philippines has typical tropical climates and is hot all a year. For having a comfortable life, it could consume a lot of electricity for heat dissipation or air conditioning. However, the electricity bill is the most expensive in Southeast Asia. In 2021, residential electricity is about USD $0.171/kWh, and commercial electricity is USD $0.120/kWh, causing a burden on the people. The design of Dream House also helps reduce the apparent temperature by up to 5.8°C, which can save a lot of electricity bills and benefit the poor.

1. Overview of Dream House: Dream House is a green housing solution modified and improved from yurts. Yurts are traditionally used as a dwelling by differenr nomadic groups in the steppes and mountains of Inner Asia. The structure of a traditional yurt includes a flexible angled assembly or latticework of wood or bamboo, for walls, a door frame, ribs (poles, rafters), and a wheel (crown, compression ring) possibly steam-bent as a roof, etc. A yurt is designed to be quicky assembled and dismantled, and the parts can be carried compactly on camels or yaks to rebuild on another site. A yurt takes only 30 minutes to 3 hours to set up or take down. Based on what we learn from yurts, Dream House was proposed as a quick-to-install, locally-sourced and low-cost housing option with a bunch of great features.

2. Features of Dream House:
(1) Well-ventilated: A Dream House item (the house) introduces cooler outdoor air into the interior from the bottom. It facilitates the indoor hot air to float upwards and to get discharged from the skylight. If the skylight is equipped with a exhaust fan, it can enhance the internal convection and reduce the apparent temperature by up to 5.8 °C.
(2) Well-insulated: Dream House adopts a double-layer design, in which the outer wall is made of bamboo tubes or bamboo weaving. The heat outside is not easy to enter, so as to achieve the effect of heat insulation. The roof is made of multiple layers of palm leaves, which can also be insulated.
(3) Wind and earthquake-resistant: The perfect circular shape of Dream House can reduce wind resistance by 30% and has proven characteristics of resisting strong winds of ≧ level 9. The roof is trapped by steel cables or covered fishing nets and tied to ground anchors to further resist typhoons. The arched roof connected to the wall has good anti-seismic effect, and can resist at least seven magnitude earthquakes.
(4) Low-cost: Compared to a square house, a circular house can save 15% of the material cost for the walls alone. All components of the Dream House are mass-produced and transported to the construction site for direct assembly. A buyer without professional knowledge and skills can follow the instructions or the Internet Video to DIY, which can save costs of professional architect design and technical labor.
(5) Low-carbon: The key components of Dream House are molded for mass production. The rest of the roof and walls can be purchased locally and assembled on-site using local materials, such as bamboo and palm leaves, to reduce the carbon footprint generated by transportation.
(6) Flood-resistant: Dream House is built with a stilt-like feature, and the bottom is covered with bamboo tubes. When a flood comes, the bamboo floats up to uplift the house. To prevent the house from being drifted away, several steel tubes are inserted deep into the ground around the house, The house is connected to the tubes via metal rings to resist floods.

The main body of an example Dream House

Dream House is designed to improve the housing conditions of poor rural populations. They live scattered in the countryside and seaside, where is far away from urban areas and has poor infrastructure. They often bear the brunt of typhoons and floods and suffer loss of life and property.

Due to the considerations of geographical closeness and high expected market demand, the Philippines is our major and first focused market. The Philippines is closest country next to where the headquarters of Dream House team and have 20 million rural population in the countryside. Most of them live in crude and simple houses, which can’t withstand the damaged caused by typhoons and floods.

Once Dream House enters the Philippines, the team will provide the house skeleton, find local factories and technicians to cooperate, and train the local poor to use bamboo and palm leaves to build the houses. It will not only provide rural communities with housing, but also offer employment opportunities.

The Dream House team consists of SIN EASY CO., LTD (SIN EASY) and other collaborators. SIN EASY has been engaged in the yurt sales business for ten years and provided OEM services to customers for making customized and characteristic yurts. The customization examples included replacing the outer tent with wood-grain metal baking varnish boards to become a circular wooden house and adding a penthouse to a yurt with a diameter of 8 m and a top height of 4.6 m. These experiences can support that the team is capable of implementing and delivering the Dream House concept in the future in terms of both technology and business.

Mr. Ming Tsung Wang, the founder of SIN EASY, has been engaged in green buildings for 20 years since he was young. He was interviewed for his buildings and the story was included in a professional book. Mr. Wang works as the team leader and provides his technical expertise and construction experience. Dr. Steven Wu from Crointel LLC is an active innovator in multiple fields. In the team, he is engaged with business development and strategy design. Miss Yi Wen Chow is an interior designer located in the Philippines. She is focused on product design and is responsible for business development in the Philippines. Therefore, the team is capable of delivering Dream House to the target rural population in the Philippines.  

Through various channels, we had started and will continue to visit people or organizations who know Philippine rural housing, e.g., stilt houses, and listen to their experiences and knowledge as a reference for improving the products and services. For the smooth implementation of the project, the team is looking for local cooperators to work with to refine the designs of Dream House and build a few samples for rural people to try to live in.

Where our sample testing and sales works will be focused on regions suffering the threat of typhoons. The works will start from Cavite next year, and expand to Cebu, Bohol, Southern Leyte, Surigao del Norte, Negros Occidentel, etc. within next five years. The team plans to set up sample Dream Houses, which is resistant to winds of level 9, in Cavite next year. The highest priority of free trials will be given to rural residents who know how to shoot videos. Their feedback will be collected by the team and their videos recording their experience will be uploaded to the internet as marketing materials to attract more people. With the data collected in the first year, the design of Dream House will be further adjusted and optimized, for a goal of Dream House to resist winds of level 11 and floods. We will modify the designs of Dream House and expand the business to the other five areas in next five years on, a rolling basis.

Dream House is currently in the prototype stage. As shown in the elevator pitch, a 3D-printing Dream House model had been prepared and placed in a simulated environment and subject to strong wind and flood tests. The team is currently working on preparing a Dream House prototype in real dimensions.

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For implementing the proposal in the Philippines, the Dream House team needs to raise sufficient funds to expand the work, recruit technical professionals to refine considerations on structural and fluid mechanics of Dream House, recruit legal professionals for dealing with local construction laws and import regulations, seek local cooperators for mass production.  

As a super large entrepreneurship network, the team expects that Solve should be able to help us connect with other Solve teams with relevant technical or legal expertise, develop local cooperation network and develop skills for fund raising. 

Dream House is innovative by creatively combining several great mechanisms to offer an integrated housing option that is ecofriendly and affordable by rural population.

1. Dream House adopts the circular shape to guide winds to bypass the house. Unlike traditional square houses which directly confront against strong winds, the circular shape reduces wind resistance and the chance of disasters.
2. Dream House employs a conical roof with a skylight to gather and discharge hot air. It could enhance the convection and make the temperature drop to a comfortable level. 
3. Dream House adopts a special buoyancy design. The bottom of house is covered with bamboo tubes or alternative materials. The design help uplift the house when floods come to prevent loss of properties and lives.
4. Dream House provides a flexible technical framework to include locally sourced material materials. For example, the skeleton of a house with a diameter of 4 meters (12.56 square meters) costs USD $270, and a house with a diameter of 8 meters (50 square meters) costs USD $670. Then, bamboo and palm leaves, which are abundant in the local area, can be used for the outer walls and roof. It offers a more ecofriendly and low-cost option to the poor. (Note: For comparison, constructing a traditional 2-room stilt house of 30 square meters in the Philippines costs around USD $2,700, though this amount covers the overall expenses.)

Based on the above innovations, the team wish to develop Dream House to become a game changer on the market, to provide rural populations a wind-resistant, flood-resistant, earthquake-resistant, low-carbon and low-cost housing option with other great features.

1. Impact goals: Dream House aligns well with several UN Sustainable Development Goals, especially the SDG 13, 1, and 8 for the environmental, social, and economic aspects respectively: These goals are the same for next year and next five years, only varying in scales.
(1) Climate Action (SDG 13): Help target populations to rebuild their houses that can avoid damages caused by extreme weather and natural disasters, by the Dream House solution with minimized carbon emissions during construction, operation, and end-of-life.
(2) No Poverty (SDG 1): Help target populations to avoid poverty by preventing their houses from frequently being damaged or destroyed in extreme weather and natural disasters if they adopt Dream Houses.   
(3) Decent Work and Economic Growth (SDG 8): Offer/create more jobs with decent pay to target populations for selling and promoting Dream Houses. 

2. Actions for next year: By 2023/24, we will focus on field investigation, partner running-in and sample testing.
(1) Field investigation: The team will send Taiwanese technicians to visit the Philippines for a month. The main destination is the countryside of Luzon Island, which is the most suffering typhoons. They will inspect at least 5 places, especially Cavite, and visit at least 10 people, such as village chiefs or community leaders, to exchange opinions through the arrangements based on Ms. Chow’s contacts.
(2) Partner running-in: The team will communicate with local building material suppliers in the Philippines, such as bamboo, wood, doors and windows, sanitary equipment, and iron suppliers, to check product quality and prices. We will also communicate with 3 workshops about the feasibility of local processing and the cost of making samples.
(3) Sample testing: As aforementioned, the team plans to perform sample testing in Cavite to collect data and feedbacks for improving the Dream House designs, and video materials for marketing.

3. Actions for next five years: Based on the preliminary work and the lessons learned from next year. The team plans to gradually expand our work to Cebu, Bohol, Southern Leyte, Surigao del Norte and Negros Occidentel in next five years. Specific jobs will be arranged dynamically on a rolling basis, depending on factors such as community and user feedback, sales performance, supplier network. 

For measuring the progress toward the three major impact goals, which were defined previously, the team plans to adopt the following indicators, but adjustable:

1. Climate Action (SDG 13): 
(1) 1.a: Number of people who are aware of Dream House
(2) 1.b: Number of people who buy a Dream House
(3) 1.c: Estimated reduced loss by adopting Dream House, compared to other housing types in the same area due to extreme weather and natural disasters
(4) 1.d: Number of areas which the Dream House business is expanded to

2. No Poverty (SDG 1):
(1) 2.a: Estimated Economic Contribution to a given area by reducing loss, caused by extreme weather and natural disasters (based on 1.c)
(2) 2.b: Average estimated economic contribution per family or per person in each area by reducing loss, caused by extreme weather and natural disasters (based on 1.b & 2.a)

3. Decent Work and Economic Growth (SDG 8):
(1) 3.a: Number of cooperative local suppliers and workshops 
(2) 3.b: Number of jobs created by the team and the cooperative local suppliers and workshops
(3) 3.c: Average salary and sum of salary provided by the team and the cooperative local suppliers and workshops

Specific works to achieve the impact goals and other relevant SDGs will be arranged based on these indicators and adjusted on a rolling basis.

Dream House will have an impact on the predefined problem by offering extra resilience against extreme weather and natural disasters to the target populations. For delivering the solution to them, jobs will be created and offered to the communities. In consequence, their economic conditions will be improved by reducing the loss caused by extreme weather and natural disasters and by new jobs offered to them.

The average income of the Philippines is about US$3,700 (2022), but the gap between the rich and the poor is huge. According to statistics, 87% of households have no savings, and the income of 20 million Philippine rural people is low. Damages to their houses caused by natural disasters, especially typhoons and floods, are heavy burdens to them.

The cost of a traditional stilt house is about 150,000 pesos for 30 square meters (2 rooms), which is equivalent to USD $2,700. It’s not cheap for the rural population but what is even worse is that typhoons are frequent in the Philippines, and often a typhoon may damage or destroy such kind of houses. It may cause house owners need to borrow money to repair or rebuild their houses, resulting in a vicious circle that they cannot get rid of poverty.

The cost of a Dream House of our team is close to that of traditional stilt houses, but Dream House can offer much better resilience against typhoons and floods. Eight yurts, as the predecessor of Dream House, were built in a seaside resort in Shimen District, New Taipei City, Taiwan. They survived the test of strong winds of ≧ level 9. As an improved version, Dream House is expected to be more wind-resistant and have extra flood and earthquake resistance. The skeleton is durable for 15-20 years, and Dream House owners can repair the damaged materials on the outer wall by themselves. In this way, they don’t need to worry about typhoons every year, causing damages to houses and causing them to fall into the predicament of borrowing money to build a house. Therefore, the people can be slowly getting out of poverty.

In addition, to deliver the solution across the Philippines, the team can create new job opportunities and provide new momentum for local economic growth by cooperating with local suppliers and transferring technology to local workshops.

Our core technology is based on yurts, the traditional Inner Asian architectural wisdom since thousands of years ago, integrated with modern building materials for optimization. 

The yurt-like structure spontaneously grants Dream House the wind-resistant and well-ventilated features. The latter can be combined with an extra exhaust fan to further reduce the apparent temperature indoor. The former can be further enhanced by the improvement of building materials and adding other components.

For enhancing the wind-resistant performance, which is also relevant to the earthquake-resistant performance. the key works are to Improve the understanding of structural, material and fluid mechanics. Specific problems include, for example, how many and how thick iron tubes are needed to resist the wind of > a certain level, how to design and place nets to cover and stabilize a house, and how many and how deep anchors are needed? 

Regarding the flood-resistant feature, our core innovations are to employ a bamboo-based (or alternative materials) buoyancy mechanism to uplift the house when floods come, and a fixture composed of steel tubes (as anchors) and metal rings (as connectors) to prevent from being drifted away. Further understanding of structural, material and fluid mechanics is also important for solving specific problems which the team may encounter.

The team’s personnel policy only considers if a candidate is suitable for a position, regardless of age, gender, ethnic group, or religious belief. The team members or employees will be allowed to work mainly at home to have flexible working hours.

Due to business needs, it is necessary to expand the team to include Filipinos, combined with Taiwanese designers and marketing/advertising personnel. Mr. Wang, who is in charge of the overall operation, had experience of fairly running this type of team. He set up two procurement offices in China when he was young, and cooperated with design and marketing personnel in Taiwan to sell art work DIY material kits. At that time, there were employees of all ages and people with disabilities. In the spirit of fairness and tolerance, they were paid according to their ability and performance, regardless of educational background, beauty, disability, and other factors. The experience will help the team to achieve the goals for becoming more diverse, equitable, and inclusive.

The team primarily adopts a B2C model but may also involve in B2B or B2G. In the B2C model, the headquarters in Taiwan is responsible for developing improving products, selling key components and assembly technology to Philippine workshops. The local workshops can then combine with local building materials to complete subsequent processes, including finishing the construction of Dream Houses, and selling them to rural individuals or communities. On the other hand, Charities (B2B) or local governments (B2G) may be interested in purchasing a certain amount of Dream Houses in advance in case the need of dealing with damages caused by typhoons, floods, or earthquakes.

The team plans to first make a complete Dream House sample. The sample will be used to prepare a microfilm to start a crowdfunding activity to raise funds for 5-10 Dream Houses. After giving souvenirs to the sponsors, the Dream House skeleton will be made and given to cooperative Filipino workshops to build Dream Houses for rural people for a free trial. After gaining word of mouth, advertising effects are expected to naturally be generated. Then, the team can officially start to sell the products in Philippines offline and online. 5% of the profits obtained will be used to build Dream Houses to be given to some more disadvantaged people. On the other hand, we may develop and sell prime or luxury versions of Dream Houses, that can be used as a private house or holiday cottages, in Philippines and other countries. This complementary strategy should help the team become financially sustainable.

As the major member of the team, Mr. Wang from SIN EASY has > 10 years of experience about yurt business which is relevant to this project. For example, SIN EASY ever sold eight yurts to a resort in New Taipei City, Taiwan with a total sale of USD $43,000 and generate a profit of USD $10,000. It is considered a successful case; however, it is a pity that it is too easy to import similar goods from China for competitors so that SIN EASY can’t stay with the same business. Therefore, the team wants to conduct R&D on developing our own products specialized for specific scenarios or purposes and be able to control key technologies and sales methods, channels and brands, for achieving financial sustainability.