Open Sailing aims to design and invent future lifestyles to overcome any possible natural and manmade disasters stimulating people’s ingenuity and sense of solidarity. Might it be global warming or energy conflicts, we are living in a time where we are sniffing the ‘Apocalypse’, finally realising our human part of responsibility as the earth is crumbling. 2012 is a year when a collection of apocalyptic events are rumored to happen.
Open Sailing is an international community trying to develop the International Ocean Station as an open source project, developing hardware and software to enable intelligent human activities at sea. The project started as an apocalyptic design response unit, but has evolved into a voluntary exploration community of passionate amateurs, inventors and scientists. We believe that in a matter of months and with a modest budget, we can challenge the civilization symbol of the International Space Station that produces today semi-secret data, that costs more than 150 billion $ to tax payers and was developed over decades by a closed group of rocket scientists. We can do it. It is not a utopian project we are working on it everyday.
The oceans covers more than 74% of the surface of the earth. The annual budget for space exploration is more than a thousand times the ocean exploration budget, yet there is so much to learn from the oceans and to do there. Life started in water, the majority of humans live at less than 150 km from the coast. We urgently need a new generation of semi-permanent affordable and sustainable architecture to explore and study the oceans, understand biodiversity, monitor climate change, address marine pollution, invent new modes of sustainable aquaculture, create data mesh networks, produce renewable energies, for navigation safety purposes and much more.?
We are taking 2012 as an ideal dystopic symbol we design for. 2012 is tomorrow, we must design quickly using these constraints and invent bootstrapping DIY technologies.