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Andrew McCarthy: Hi! I'm Andrew McCarthy. Thank you for sending Ask M your questions
regarding my thesis project which is studying extreme climates. I've selected a few of the
questions which I’d like to go through today and send out a few answers.
Phosgraphia sends in the first question and asks does the tent that you built have any
features not usually offered in tents? Are there any changes that you would make to the
structure now that you have experienced living in it?
And this is a great question because this is exactly what I'm working on currently in
my thesis. I'm trying to use some of the experiences that I've had in the different climate zones
on the mountain and redesign several characteristics of the tent.
So some of the main changes that I'm working on are how to incorporate solar, so how to
really harness the sun’s energy and deliver it back into the tent which could possibly
create a controlled interior environment where it'd be able to provide some sort of heat.
And the second main change that I'm working on is the structure and how to really create
a structure that’s a little bit lighter and a little bit stronger. So as the winds
shift, wind gust comes from one direction to the other, the tent would also be able
to shift; it’d be responsive with the direction of the winds.
And the second question that was sent in from one of our viewers was what was the biggest
challenge in building a tent and do you think that tent can survive another expedition?
The challenges for the tent were really in two parts. One was the larger challenge of
just the overall deadline that there was three weeks to build the tent and that materials
were not locally here in Ann Arbor. So I was constantly having a material inventory which
communicated with people from the West Coast in how to get materials here in time.
And then the other challenge was the digital design and the fabrication, where really to
get the double curvature surface required a lot of testing to really test the efficacy
of the digital to see what was being designed in the computer and what was being built actually
aligned with one another.
And the last question, yes, I hope that the tent can survive another expedition and I
hope there will be one in the near future.
And the third question that was sent in from one of our viewers was what are the significant
differences in design for hot, arid, and cold climates?
This is one of the other areas that my thesis is continuing to focus on, and some of the
major differences are materials. So the material palettes that I choose were of the similar
materials that are already being used in tent production. And some of the materials that
I'm hoping to study are ones that are not being used and how they might respond in exactly
cold, arid, and hot climates.
So that particular part of the research is still ongoing, but what is certain is the
way that a tent connects to the ground, and that in snow you'll use a stake and you’d
be able to drive it in, whereas when we were in rock in Aconcagua, it was actually a much
more hard rock, it’s a moraine which is on top of a glacier. So you're then connecting
to larger boulders and you’re creating an infrastructure on your space.
So when you design for the different types of climate whether it’d be cold or hot,
you always have to consider what the ground condition is before you’re able to design.
Thank you for sending in all of your questions regarding my project. Please visit my blog,
abletoinhabit.com as the project is continuing to evolve and the thesis is wrapping up over
the next few days and there will be a lot of new material as well as speculative research
for future design. And please stay tuned for the next edition of Ask M.