Housing Alternatives Collection

Description

Housing Alternatives Collection (HAC) is an exploratory project to create and distribute a digital artwork/token (NFT) collection, to help fund, reward membership in, and creatively explore key ideas of Housing Alternatives Network.

The Collection will consist of (tentatively) 1000 images/icons representing an encyclopedic span of possible housing forms, generated by combining all variations of basic housing characteristics. For example: plan, section, roof type, building materials clustering/multiunit, site and ground/support type, attachedness/mobility, permanence, and ownership or tenure types.

Below: design sketches for HAC, using AI (Artificial Intelligence) to generate images based on varying verbal descriptions:

This investigation offers a creative and concrete way to examine what are fundamental variables in housing, which combinations more commonly exist and might hypothetically exist, and which forms people in our community find more interesting or wish to associate with themselves.

Supporters and participants in HAN would be able to choose and acquire unique HAC icons/tokens as NFTs (Non-fungible tokens), public digital certificates that represent your ownership of the image, and your membership and ‘passport’ in HAN.

This project is partly inspired by, for example, the 'Kiftables' NFT collection issued by digital-nomad site network Kift. This offers 10,000 images of variant 'vanlife' type camper vans, with variant vant types, colors, backgrounds, and accessories. (see examples below; the Kiftables NFT owned by me (Tim) is first):