Cameron Sinclair is a man who values his sleep. As he juggles a new baby, a travel schedule so frenetic he has a 'Where is Cameron' web page, and a battle against shoddy housing worldwide, he's seen sleep go from being an enjoyable day-capper to quite a luxury.
'In the next two generations we're going to double the number of buildings on Earth,' the 33-year-old says. 'One in three people at that time will be living in slum settlements, according to UN statistics. The places booming are China, Brazil, India, but this growth is in their bottom 40 per cent [in terms of income] so it's really time to respond to those needs.'
Many have heard of Habitat for Humanity (HFH), former US president Jimmy Carter's global NGO, which has similar statistics. Yet other than a healthy mutual respect, the affiliation between them ends there.
HFH arms average folk with hammers and packs them off to build houses in poor communities the world over, home by home. Smaller and younger, Architecture for Humanity (AFH) has taken a wider perspective and zeroed in on a potential cure-all: design.
Sinclair, a co-founder, is at the helm. 'I got interested in humanitarian design because of a misunderstanding,' he says. 'I had assumed that to be an architect you'd need to build structures that would improve the lives of a community as a whole. Then I went to architecture school and was stunned to find this wasn't the case. Everyone wanted to do airports and use cool computer graphics.'
A move to New York and some notable design credentials later, and Sinclair was still bothered. While war raged in Kosovo and talk of military 'end games' dominated TV news, he was watching the refugees and mentally designing better tents for them. In 1999 he and journalist Kate Stohr, now his wife, took the plunge and founded AFH.
Design and architecture are often regarded as luxury commodities - the preserve of holiday home owners, not families camped in rubble and living on soup. At a recent presentation on humanitarian design in San Francisco, Sinclair and Stohr offered a few examples of design thoughtlessness. Most were from a new book project they co-authored, entitled Design Like You Give a Damn: Architectural Responses to Humanitarian Crises.
In one photograph, helmet-like Oxfam kit-houses sit amid the baking rubble of a 1976 earthquake in Turkey. The kits were cheap and easy to assemble, but they were also hot, dark and hard to repair. Aid workers dubbed them 'Darth Vader houses'. The newly homeless chose to sleep outside.
Yet even now things aren't too different. During the Asian tsunami in 2005, Sinclair says, AFH went in on the ground and joined several major organisations in the Sri Lankan rebuilding effort.
'Most development groups still think, 'Let's just give them the basics,'' he says. 'They'd have
one engineer and a whole bunch of accountants, and the result would not be sustainable.
'It's incredible what actually gets built. Someone who owns a concrete block factory offers them for cheap, so that's the building.'
Communities, he says, need homes that at least slightly suit their lifestyles, and which can be adapted as people pick themselves up again. The average refugee camp's life after a disaster is nine years. Darth Vader dwellings just don't cut it.
As part of its efforts to change things, AFH has come up with innovations ranging from inflatable hemp houses designed in Japan to neighbourhoods built from food crates. Yet helpful design need not be so wacky, or so intricate. One of Sinclair's favourite examples is a partition flap recently integrated into the aid tents of the UN High Commission for Refugees. In refugee camps, where sexual abuse is common, something this simple goes a long way.
While Stohr coordinates much of AFH's work in the US, particularly on the Gulf Coast, Sinclair selects and runs projects from Senegal to Pakistan. Both spend much of their time fund-raising and organising the placement of volunteer designers in communities worldwide, and it's here, rather than in the emergency sector, that much of their hope for global change lies.
On stage in San Francisco, the pair describe their mission. 'One billion people live in abject poverty, but four billion live on US$2-US$6 a day,' Sinclair says, perched on a table near a large projector screen. 'The latter work on improving their housing but are at constant risk of sliding back. It is for them that innovation can really make a difference.' Cue one shot of an angular, futuristic-looking series of concrete houses in Iquique, a desert city in Chile.
One hundred families once occupied the site illegally and needed to be rehoused on a limited budget with limited space. Elemental, a Chilean design group, created the award-winning Elemental Collective House by designing a 'housing skeleton' that could be filled in and expanded on by impressed residents.
In South Africa, in March, another design was greeted with glee - this time by young soccer fans. Singapore-born architect Ng Swee Hong was the winner of an AFH competition to design a football pitch and health outreach centre in an area where youths have a high risk of contracting HIV. Ng's design uses the shape of the landscape, with amphitheatre-like terraces that can double as performance spaces.
In the past few years such projects have taken AFH designers from Tamil Nadu to Tanzania, designing everything from medical centres to tsunami-safer houses. Yet the biggest link between these projects is their differences.
A school designed for the Himalayas would be a white elephant in Mozambique and vice versa. This is the crux of the challenge facing AFH. 'The reality is that we live in a global society that has environmental and cultural differences, even from village to village,' Sinclair says. 'So we just can't come up with one solution. We need a system that can create 100 million solutions.'
About 18 months ago AFH won the new TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) Prize, and these 100 million solutions suddenly became very possible. Each year the US-based conference gives three winners US$100,000 and corporate sponsorship to achieve a set goal.
AFH's project, the Open Architecture Network, is an online forum that enables architects to post projects and collaborate on social and humanitarian work. It also benefits from the Creative Commons Developing Nations Licence, another AFH-related project that allows architects to use each other's patented designs freely for the good of developing countries.
What had once been a two-person operation, and then a 2,000-strong organisation, has in a year become a global force. However, it still has the monetary concerns of every NGO.
Sinclair addressed Africa's biggest design conference, Design Indaba, in Cape Town earlier this year. Now he's about to start travelling through North America to raise funds. Then it's on to Italy.
'Something like the Indaba Cape Town trip for me is the perfect vacation,' he said before the trip.
'I'm going to go out there for the conference, but in my free time I'll meet with community groups to look at potential projects. They'll take me around and show me what it's all about.'
It seems that for now, sleep will have to wait.