Tiny Homes

Eighth grade Creators students are immersed in an in-depth study of the tiny house movement. They researched unique aspects of tiny home design, explored and chose a city where they could build a tiny house incorporating sustainable technologies, and then designed a tiny house with a specific client or location in mind. The tiny house project teaches and reinforces a wide variety of creativity and design skills, including brainstorming, research, understanding scale, creating interior and exterior elevation drawings and perspective drawings of the food plan, and then transferring their design to a digital design program to laser cut the final models. 

At 400 square feet or less, tiny houses challenge designers to use space efficiently and incorporate design innovations that make spaces multifunctional. The small size and minimalist design are also conducive to green buildings. Before starting the design process, students learned about the United Nations' seventeen Sustainable Development Goals. They reflected on how tiny houses could help meet those goals by incorporating green building materials and technologies. Choosing a location for their tiny house required students to research cities worldwide and evaluate the climate, available resources, and how societal factors like the government, economy, and housing availability might impact a tiny home. Students also chose a specific client to design for to ensure their design would be user-centered. The six profile options included a mother and adult son with a disability, a family of four with two children, and an elderly couple in their 70s. While some classes focused on the unique needs of a specific client, others were assigned a random biome to design for, such as the extreme temperatures of the Australian outback, a beachfront, or a heavily wooded location.

Each student began the design process by creating an inspiration board with photography, designs, color palettes, and textures, highlighting the ideas that would influence their design. Then, they designed the floor plan for their tiny house and created two interior elevation drawings and two exterior elevation drawings. They also learned how to make a one-point perspective drawing of their design. Some classes build rough drafts of their final design out of cardboard before transferring their plans into Adobe Illustrator, but all the final tiny house designs will be laser cut to create a 3D model. 

Students have responded to the challenge of designing for different clients and environments with impressive creativity. One student, designing for a college student based in China, is working on a mobile tiny home design on wheels that responds to the client's desire to travel and explore. Another student designing for a swampy, wooded environment is designing a tiny home on stilts that protect the living space from water. "This project encourages students to use empathy as they think about the needs of a particular client," says Design Teacher Deborah Morrone-Bianco, "and also to think deeply about the environment and the available resources that they can use in their design."