Interview To Alastair Parvin And Wikihouse Project

Simone Cicero | Open Electronics | October 17, 2013

For the latest episode of our Meet The Founders interviews we are releasing today the intervivew we made recently with WIkihouse funder Alastair Parvin. The interview come up superbe and it touches a lot of topics, ranging from furniture manufacturing to VC strategies, from crowdfunding to openness.

There are the kind of post you cannot miss on OpenElectronics: terrific vision, a committed founder immersed in a great context of innovation (partners, friends, UK seems a real hub for radical innovation these days).

As Alastair told us WikiHouse wasn’t only created by him alone but, like many interesting projects, its genesis and authorship is plural and fuzzy so we asked him about the genesis of the project and his background in doing this, in details:

[Alastair Parvin] It’s important to bust that myth of the solitary architect! I think probably everyone involved in WikiHouse has come at it from their own particular approach, but with a common awareness that housing is a problem worth looking at, and that Open Source and distributed manufacturing have the potential to be disruptive in the way we make it. Although I’ve been fascinated by OS movement since I was a student (I remember my friend Adam introducing me The Cathedral & the Bazaar by Eric S Raymond when we were undergrads), my personal approach to WikiHouse is through the economics of housing production. [...]