Good Deed Of The Day: Ingersoll Rand Underwrites Global Competition to Design a $300 House (IR)

Ingersoll Rand IR is underwriting the $300 House Design Challenge, a global competition that seeks designs for affordable and sustainable housing for the world's poor. Participants must design a simple dwelling that costs $300 to construct. The house should address fundamental human needs, provide protection from the elements, and reinforce a sense of dignity for residents. The entry deadline is May 31, 2011, and winners will be announced soon after. Ingersoll Rand will provide scholarships for the top entries to a two-week workshop to build prototypes of the $300 house. The workshop will take place the last two weeks of June 2011 under the supervision of Common, a new collaborative community/brand for social entrepreneurs. The $300 House Challenge is a conduit for global participants – including designers, architects, students and professionals, – to collaborate, design and validate a business model for the profitable construction of the houses in developing markets. Although residents can be located in any part of the world, initial target areas for the dwellings are in areas of extreme poverty, such as India, Haiti and Indonesia. In addition to Ingersoll Rand, there are dozens of challenge partners including Harvard Business Review, Dartmouth College, National Economic Committee of Indonesia, Cornell University, Singapore Management University and the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. The project uses crowdsourcing to generate ideas. Crowdsourcing is the act of outsourcing tasks, traditionally performed by an employee or a contractor, to an undefined, large group of people or community (a "crowd"), through an open call. Because it is an open call to an undefined group of people, it gathers those who are most fit to perform tasks, solve complex problems and contribute with the most relevant and fresh ideas.