Holey Roket: Eco-centric Vernacular Design

Holey Roket is a cooking stove type designed to improve existing cooking systems. Recognizing that more than fifty communities in Africa, South America and Asia use briquettes as a primary cooking fuel, this design project seeks to help improve local cooking solutions. Designed to use the biomass briquettes similar to those available in rural communities around the world, Holey Roket was developed in collaboration with Legacy Foundation, an Oregon-based NGO advocating alternative fuel technology. Designed for biomass briquettes, Holey Roket aims to dramatically reduce fuel consumption and harmful emissions. Borrowing from existing stove technologies and working in collaboration with local entrepreneurs, this design typology and social network has evolved as the fabrication of briquettes improves and knowledge about this alternative fuel is shared. Holey Roket is based on the understanding that, together with stove design and briquette fabrication, information sharing is necessary to help create better cooking systems. Holey Roket designs are currently being tested in four international contexts: DR Congo, Chad, Uganda, and Cambodia. Existing briquette manufacturing enterprises in each place represent different sets of socio-cultural relations and demand an adaptable consultant-design methodology capable of working with different materials, briquette recipes, gastronomic cultures, and social structures. Holey Roket represents a methodology designed to connect with local entrepreneurial networks and involves communicating information about stove technology and the adaptation of a Holey Roket typology across different contexts. This project is informed by the eco-centric concept of “ecosophy” developed in writings of Arne Naess and Felix Guattari. Ecosophy recognizes the philosophical milieu as a field of intrinsic social, economic, and cultural relations where one needs to find ways of partaking in non-anthropocentric collaboration. Extending ecosophy to a design context, Holey Roket looks at ‘vernacular’ building processes that unfold according to traditional, site-specific designs. Holey Roket engages with the virtual environment as a form of direct action. Accumulated information from various environments contributes to the single product-type data-base, and brings diverse local knowledge to a common table. Adaptations of Holey Roket show how experimentation gradually becomes tradition, and in the process, resilient, ever-more efficient cooking stove concepts are adapted to an increasing number of environments.