Backpack
The carry layer. What a person can move on foot. Ours is a structural frame that unfolds into the furniture you need when you arrive: desk, clothing rack, gear stand.
Open the Portable Room Backpack →A modular kit, designed in the open
One kit for living anywhere.
Not separate products. One modular way of living that moves with you: a backpack, a tent, a desk, an e-bike, a car, and a yurt that all fit together.
Everything earns its place. Home is something you carry and set up, not somewhere you are stuck. This page is the journal of the kit as it gets designed, one honest piece at a time.
Honest status
Some pieces already have pages and prototypes elsewhere on this portal. Some are still just a name and a pile of references being collected. Nothing here is for sale. Everything here is meant to be copied.
See the modules →The kit
The modules.
Six named so far. Each one has to work alone and fit the rest.
Tent
Fast shelter. One night to one week, up quick, down quick. References are being collected; there is no design yet, and this card will not pretend otherwise.
Desk
The work layer. A universal travel standing desk: one pole, a small tray, wheels, and nothing in the way of your feet. The first real-world reference is already spotted and photographed.
Open the desk page →E-bike
The quiet range extender between walking and driving. Named, wanted, not yet designed. It will have to carry kit, not just a rider.
Car
The heavy hauler that carries the kit between bases. The vehicle thinking lives on the Life Utility Vehicle page: one open platform, swappable modules, built to be kept and repaired.
Open the Life Utility Vehicle →Yurt
Slow shelter. The base camp that feels like a home. And the piece that stops moving when the farm happens.
And more
Kitchen, power, water, and light will want modules of their own when they get named. The cloth layer already exists: natural linen clothing, made to be repaired and remade.
Open the linen project →How it is built
The pattern.
The same rules for every module, whatever it turns out to be.
Hotel-grade toughness
If it survives banquet staff and back-of-house corners, it survives travel. Weak and clever loses to strong and simple.
Natural materials first
Linen before synthetics. Wood, metal, canvas: materials a person can understand, repair, and replace close to home.
Small footprints
Every module packs down, tucks away, or folds flat when it is not working. Nothing gets to be bulky for no reason.
Multi-use parts
A frame that is also furniture. A tray that is also a mount. If a part only does one job, it has to be a very good job.
Finished designs get the full recipe published: design, materials, cost, instructions, repairs. That is the Open Object Standard the Everyday Life projects already follow.
Roots
Standing on open shoulders.
This idea has a family tree, and it is a public one.
Open Source Ecology designs the machines and systems a small group needs to live well, and publishes the plans so anyone can build and improve them. Their Global Village Construction Set is that idea at village scale. The System is the same idea at family scale: open designs, shared freely, forked by anyone.
It grows out of Open Source Everyday Life, the portal's open-recipe program for everyday things, where the backpack and the linen work already live. The wider thinking is in the open source field guide, and the long road, cars, tents, and yurts included, is sketched on the expansion path.
Where it is going
The farm is where the yurt stops moving.
The kit is the bridge. The land is the destination.
Thomas and Kristin are saving toward a food-forest, off-grid farm. The System is how to live well until then: mobile, light, and whole. When the land is real, the yurt becomes the first building, the desk stands in it, and the kit becomes the seed of the farm instead of a way to travel.
Until then it is references, sketches, and prototypes, kept in the open. Earth is a garden planet →
The point
Build it in the open.
Copy it. Fork it. Make it yours.
That was always the deal: open source everything, so everyone can have it.