single day during January 2005 in the US)-45% of the total count were unsheltered, 30 percent of this population are chronically homeless. (1,780 unsheltered homeless individuals are estimated to be on the streets and in parks and subway stations in Manhattan).

The group I want to address specifically are the unsheltered homeless persons: those who do not use shelters and are on the streets, in abandoned buildings, or in other places not meant for human habitation. Reasons why they don't go to shelters are: they are unsafe, they do not have space left. Unsheltered Homeless are mostly drug addicts, alcoholics, mentally ill people.

SHELLHOUSE is origin in the idea of ubiquitous computing, or invisible computing, that will be there in a close future for all of us to live in smart houses: our necessities will be guessed when we need them.

Unsheltered homeless people, refers to a group that does not report any economical, social or political reward back, a group that will not generate anything to our society standards, but that they are part of it.

What are the uses of New Technologies? Where are we leading them and which groups are having benefit of it? Is technology enlarging the social gap between people.

SOLUTION
Putting together two concepts located at the opposite extremes such as accessibility and poverty, I took materials that could be good metaphors of them, like cardboard, found at any waste corner in New York, that could be re-used, transformed, accessible.

In the other hand, technology, that needs certain specific literacy to work with, such as radio transmitters and microcontrollers, in a simple low cost electronic circuit.

Cardboard grabbed from the streets, that using origami and tessellations techniques allow build a collapsible shelter. A radio transmitter and a 9V battery embedded on each one of them, emits radio signals to a hand held receiver that has sound samples previously recorded of the name, age and place of origin of the person using the shelter, by means of headphones in a 100 mts radio.

In the future, the network could be implemented to work on a cell phone system, LCD screens on the streets, Google maps, etc.

We can make this group visible by providing them collapsible shelter and a portable address, for then work on a possible integration.

The instructions to build your own SHELLHOUSE are uploaded to the internet for people to make their own at home for then mail it to Saint Francis of Assissi Church in N.Y., since May/07.

People had been commenting, supporting the project, it had been taken as example of design, architecture and art classes and even it is given as a class in L.A. Not a single shelter had been received by the Church.

FINANCE
The project needs to be better known and this could be only possible if I get a number of shelters to be working massively out in the streets to finally call people's attention for maybe not make them to build the shelters, but give very few money to build them and give them to homeless.

NEXT STEP
I had been working on developing a better programming system to enlarge the network and be able to make (in an optimistic scenario) a big network and be able to connect to a map in the internet.

Customizing the programming and testing the radio system (try also with RFID, wich are less interactive and have shorter distance range, but are very much cheaper) can be also a good possibility.

Also, test in different, more lasting materials, which would be a different concept, but definitely, more practical.

It is important to take the project to a more practical stage and be able to build an interface that can be integrated to commonly used online networks, such as Google maps or social networks such as Facebook or My Space, which would make homeless people definitely more visible.

Using social networks to help others should not be a separate aspect, but part of the same instance to make people work towards future.