Backpack Tent for Disaster Areas

When natural disasters strike people can lose their homes and end up with no place to stay. This is obviously a problem because people will have no place for shelter. Here’s a neat idea for a tent that can be carried around as a backpack or be dragged around on its wheels.

Intended toward disaster victims, the “Temp-pack” by Asher Dunn is a shelter cum cart that folds into a portable backpack for quick and easy transportation. Comprising two pieces, the body and the door, made in recycled plastic, the portable shelter folds open and snaps the door into a right angle to create a dolly. Featuring two straps, with elastic core, to be used as bungee cords, the backpack straps other items either onto the dolly or in front of the shelter when the door is closed. The backpack also includes a handle that extends upwards to roll it on two wheels, while hooks on either side of the handle add more storage options to the unit. A compartment behind the expendable handle keeps the shelter intact. Made of waterproof fabric, the shelter includes a spring steel wire frame to maintain a freestanding tent structure and extend outward up to seven feet, resting the occupant in comfort. Users may simply push one end of the tent to fold it safely within the backpack.

See it at the Design Blog.

Good Ideas from 2010

Foreign Policy magazine has compiled a list of some of the best ideas from 2010. It’s an inspiring list that should make everyone feel a little more hopeful for the future of humanity.

And yet, all the bad news came with a surprising upside. Driven by the need to do more with less, the year’s boldest innovators turned up better, simpler ways to use our shrinking resources to improve global quality of life: ideas like creating demand for development so that poor people can better help themselves and handing money directly to those who need it, as well as new approaches to measuring and mapping that offer better, faster information about what aid needs to go where. This moment of global insecurity has also called into doubt some old shibboleths — not least that national borders as we know them are good and that resource wealth is bad.

In what sometimes looked like the worst of times, it was actually the best of times for ideas — and these ideas will shape how the world recovers in the years to come.

Read the selection of good ideas here.

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