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the Digital Twin?
Exploring Ramboland's Digital Twin

Welcome to Ramboland's digital twin! Our unique navigation system allows you to explore this groundbreaking project from multiple perspectives.

Dive in and discover how Ramboland is demonstrating that our cities can heal ecosystems while supporting all citizens. Your exploration of this digital twin contributes to the evolving vision of Ramboland. Enjoy your journey!

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Life
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Energy
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Water
Humans

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Ramboland Press
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Ron Rambo brings a unique approach to green living

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Ramboland Is Increasing Self-Sufficiency for People with Disabilities through Architecture Designed To Heal

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Learning from one differently-abled man launched nationally acclaimed sustainability in Lancaster

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Intro Video
Team

Carol Hickey

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Chad Adams

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Cheryl Love

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Elizabeth Baldwin

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Erin Raup

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Frank Sherman (RIP)

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Hawa Lassanah

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Jesse Pellman

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Jim Remlin

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John Boecker

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John Gould

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John Harper

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Kirby Smith

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Kris Haycook

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Marcus Sheffer

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Max Zahniser

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Ron Rambo

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Sam Horochowski

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Spenser Yost

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Team Rambo

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Theresa Jordan

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Thomas Devenny

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Partners

7 Group

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Sherwood Design Engineers

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Introba

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Water Research Center

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Regenerative Nexus

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ELA

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UDS Foundation

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DBC Partners

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Longview Structures

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Steven Winter Associates

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Welcome to Ramboland

Ramboland will be a living laboratory, demonstrating that our cities can heal our ecosystems while supporting the lives of all citizens, including those with special needs, far better and less expensively than we do today.

This website is intended to be Ramboland's digital twin. Like the physical site, it is, and will continue to be in a state of becoming, The twins will be increasingly integrated with each other utilized for educational programs. Eventually onsite sensors, data streams, bioregional climate data, and human-collected reports will be made visible here, live-visualizing the complex systems that make up this ecosystemic living building.

We want to make the higher possibilities for our built environments visible to the world as they evolve and are utilized over time. We strongly believe that a whole-systems approach to regenerative architecture can produce living and economic prosperity, and support the health and wealth generation of our most neglected and abused communities and individuals.

Energy

Energy being managed at the goldilocks (just right) scale, aka the community, means cultivating a harmony across boundaries, linking homes and other sites that need more energy, and cannot produce a surplus of it, with places that can produce far more energy than they themselves need. This interlinking among "cells" will gradually "re-holonize*" (to make whole and healthy again) the larger grid that must go through a just-transition (managing for job transitions and risk of collapse) from its centralized architecture. By switching away from most Earth-mining approaches (except maybe geothermal) to what you might call "sky-mining" of sunlight and wind at a community scale, rather than individual sites or city or even larger scales, one of our biggest safety and financial weaknesses (the energy grid) can become perhaps our most reliable foundation for not only comfort for the elite, but equity and sovereignty for all.

What this actually looks like: In the future, additional places like Ramboland that have also become block-scale, central-plant (utilities managed in a central location, but in this case as this smaller "nano-grid," block scale) power-houses will share their surpluses with neighbors who co-own the utility entity. The neighbors enroll their yard, roof, and potentially even exterior walls in the food, water, and energy harvesting systems connected at the core of their blocks. EV transportation of these surpluses between blocks may even actually make sense for the complex energy storage needs and until running power lines across streets between blocks becomes easier. Energy surpluses (renewable energy production beyond the amount needed for use by buildings) will be used very constructively to pump around water that should be kept out of the sewer systems anyway, as well as power grow lights, both of which support the production of food.

*to make whole again; coined by Barbara Lima and Max Zahniser

Re-Holonizing Design Practice Article Series coming soon

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Earth

The intangible aspects of the most tangible element: Our neighborhood materiality mostly shows up as a threat or problem these days. Whether its decaying or contaminant leaching building materials costly to maintain & replace, or litter, or the lead and other contaminates in the soil (not to mention the living pathogens we're very conditioned to avoid absolutely in our biophobic culture, despite evidence that exposure to rich soil in childhood creates much healthier immune systems).

But this element and system is the foundation (literally and figuratively) of all else we're able to experience. It is our ground, again literally and figuratively. It establishes our access to potential, or lack there-of.

By weaving it with the other elements in the ways healthy Life does, it becomes the key nutrients and goods that provide for needs through commerce, air, and water flows, for which Earth also provides the structures and connective tissue. This bridging across the political and ownership boundaries we've carved into the face of the land, allows that flow in the medium elements (money, air, and water) to carry the nutrients between us.

Water

Mediums have value most, or perhaps only when in motion; we can orchestrate this, but obstruct only for short periods, otherwise to our peril.

The water we treat as a nuisance becomes such. We’ve been treating rain as a nuisance in our design of our civic water systems for a long time now. And our combined sewer and stormwater systems are overburdened during most significant rain events. This causes those systems to overflow untreated mixes of rain and sewage into the very water bodies from which we draw our drinking water. These are ecosystems that are vulnerable to imbalances in nutrients or contaminant loads from our sewers.  So we then use remove these contaminants, as well as others from farms and other towns upstream, or at least try to get them below the EPA’s legal limits (their recommended dosage is zero).

The water we call rain has some contaminants too, but usually far less problematic ones. So we envision eventually being allowed to drink our own collected and treated rain on site. This would be the healthiest strategy. Plants don’t want chlorine or hexavalent chromium, nor most of the pharmaceuticals and hormones present in the drinking water in most American cities, and increasingly PFAS and other industrial contaminants.

Ramboland’s water system is structured to demonstrate the validity of these approaches without violating city code in the meantime. We’ll be using rainwater for everything we’re allowed. Right now most places don’t allow people to drink rain because cities can’t control the quality of the treatment across a bunch of different sites. But sensor and communication technologies are allowing redundant treatment and constant quality reporting. Soon this will make far more sense than centralizing treatment at large water treatment plants.

As crazy as it may sound it may also make sense for Ramboland, after YIMBY has spread to other blocks to use one or more electric vehicles as expanded energy storage, and a means gather water from partners’ rain barrels throughout the neighborhood. The low mileage, high torque nature of these trips are a perfect fit for EVs, and their huge batteries expand the capacity of the nanogrid (like a microgrid but smaller).

The increasing amount of rain we’re projected to receive from fewer and fewer storm events, separated by more and more droughts, only exaggerated the importance and value of greater water storage. And a hybrid of big central cisterns like at Ramboland and connected to other roofs with pipes and houses with rain barrels throughout the neighborhoods will maximize our vulnerable neighborhood(s) to fair better than nearly any others in terms of food and water security.

Air

The ultimate integrator of the global, local, and goldilocks scale of intervention in between.

Most cities are experiencing an improvement to air quality.

Explore the Community

Scroll vertically, or use the navigation on the left, to explore the different Key Sub Systems that inform the design of this project.

Life

Transcending and including them all, in a process of weaving complexity and mutualism out of decay and decline. The vitality of our humans needs our living systems, and to heal and increase the vitality of the other living systems, we are needed. This must not be reserved for rural areas. Our cities can and must serve as rich ecological zones, and this more possible than you might think. Like sunken ships providing surface area for the restoration and/or growth of coral reefs, our built-environment can be designed and retrofitted to support many forms of interdependent life, which can increase the production of food systems and eliminate the need for pesticides and herbicides if property tended. In concert, Life becomes far more viable, and with humans playing their role in these systems we are richly rewarded with provisions for our emotional and physical needs. From such a point of wealth and health, we can co-evolve to unimagined levels of capacity.

Humans

by playing the role described in the Life category at this scale, and weaving the and tending to the systems described throughout the others, humans can actually generate wealth. We can create value! This affords us the will and other resources to drive toward new heights of social equity, wellness, resources access, ownership, urban-ecological health, air quality, water quality, food quality, and access to those qualities across them all.

Energy

Energy to us means more than just utilities, or generating and utilizing solar power; it means considering all the forms of energy entering and exiting the site system. Energy is perhaps the most fundamental element of our universe, especially any living system, buildings are no exception. By carefully considering the site's and the buildings' orientation, massing, and exposure to the sun through the course of a day and the course of a year we can reject or harness the sun's energy most effectively, through "passive-first" heating, cooling, ventilation, pumping, and lighting systems, such that this site produces far more electricity than it consumes.

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Earth

Everything built on this Earth is made up of this Earth. In regenerative design it's important to consider the properties and qualities of materials we use, as well as the means of extraction, manufacturing, transportation and installation. In designing this site we've deeply considered the land it sits on, the steel, the wood, glass, and concrete the will be used in the construction. We have and will continue to consider the material "metabolism" of this project, and its community, as we strive to utilizing what would otherwise be considered waste, reducing demand for virgin materials, removing litter and pollution, and supporting local artisans and other makers in terms of their material sources and opportunity for showcasing their work.

Water

Water is an ever more precious resource on this planet. It's important to consider how we conserve, treat, and capture water. Ramboland will harvest rainwater through out the year and utilize it in many innovative ways. Grey water systems will recycle water that can be reused to water plants in the greenhouse and and gardens. Cisterns will store rainwater for future use. The whole site is designed to create no wastewater nor stormwater runoff.

Air

Air brings breath to life. It's critically important that we take more care in considering how we treat our air and what we put into it, inside and outside of buildings. Buildings account for approximately 39% of global energy-related carbon emissions. That's a lot of carbon in the atmosphere heating up the planet. Ramboland would sequester far more carbon than it emits, and all the plants on the site would generate far more oxygen than the human inhabitants consume. Careful thought has gone into all the material choices in the building to make sure that no adhesive, paints, or treatments will be used that emit harmful pollutants into the interior and into the atmosphere. Air filtration and circulation systems keep air flowing through the house and the greenhouse.

Life

A living building is a home to life in all it's forms. Ramboland would be a regenerative micro farm. It would also be home to many birds, bats, and other pollinator species. Agriculture and agricultural required land-use changes account for 23% of carbon emissions world wide. If we grew the food we eat in our neighborhood, on existing, under-utilized spaces, we could reduce this beyond 0. Ramboland will be an example of what anyone can grow in their back yard. We also want to deeply consider the life and quality of life of John Rambo. This home would be an ideal place for John to spend the rest of his life, and for future inhabitants to spend their lives.

Humans

People, community, society. All of these Key Systems conspire to facilitate our human thriving. Thriving happens when we come together to meet the needs of our community. Ramboland wouldn't only be a vibrant example of what's possible with Regenerative design, it will be a living laboratory where people will come to grow food, learn about regenerative design principles and systems, and learn about resilience, access, and inter-dependence. What happens at Ramboland can reverberate around the world and inform countless future regenerative living buildings. We can prove what's possible here and use this as a model for all kinds of housing solutions that are so greatly needed by so many people around the world.

Explore the site

Scroll vertically, or use the navigation on the left, to explore the different Key Sub Systems that inform the design of this project.

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Solar Arrays on Garage and House

Solar Arrays on Garage and House

Solar Arrays on Garage and House

Solar Arrays on Garage and House

Solar Arrays on Garage and House

Solar Arrays on Garage and House

Solar Arrays on Garage and House

Solar Arrays on Garage and House

Solar Arrays on Garage and House

Solar Arrays on Garage and House

Solar Arrays on Garage and House

Solar Arrays on Garage and House

Solar Arrays on Garage and House

Solar Arrays on Garage and House

Solar Arrays on Garage and House

Solar Arrays on Garage and House

Solar Arrays on Garage and House

Solar Arrays on Garage and House

Solar Arrays on Garage and House

Solar Arrays on Garage and House

Solar Arrays on Garage and House

Solar Arrays on Garage and House

Solar Arrays on Garage and House

Solar Arrays on Garage and House

Solar Arrays on Garage and House

Solar Arrays on Garage and House

Solar Arrays on Garage and House

Solar Arrays on Garage and House

Solar Arrays on Garage and House

Solar Arrays on Garage and House

Solar Arrays on Garage and House

Solar Arrays on Garage and House

Solar Arrays on Garage and House

Solar Arrays on Garage and House

Solar Arrays on Garage and House

Solar Arrays on Garage and House

Solar Arrays on Garage and House

Solar Arrays on Garage and House

Solar Arrays on Garage and House

Solar Arrays on Garage and House

Solar Arrays on Garage and House

Solar Arrays on Garage and House

Solar Arrays on Garage and House

Solar Arrays on Garage and House

Solar Arrays on Garage and House

Solar Arrays on Garage and House

Solar Arrays on Garage and House

Solar Arrays on Garage and House

Solar Arrays on Garage and House

Solar Arrays on Garage and House

Solar Arrays on Garage and House

Solar Arrays on Garage and House

Solar Arrays on Garage and House

Solar Arrays on Garage and House

Solar Arrays on Garage and House

Solar Arrays on Garage and House

Solar Arrays on Garage and House

Solar Arrays on Garage and House

Solar Arrays on Garage and House

Solar Arrays on Garage and House

Solar Arrays on Garage and House

Solar Arrays on Garage and House

Solar Arrays on Garage and House

Solar Arrays on Garage and House

Solar Arrays on Garage and House

Solar Arrays on Garage and House

Solar Arrays on Garage and House

Solar Arrays on Garage and House

Solar Arrays on Garage and House

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Counter-intuitive / Outside the Box Thinking

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This is a great example of the outside-the-box, creative contortions we find ourselves in when we audaciously step into extremely aggressive goals with a world-class team, working from regenerative thinking and integrative principles. Several of these ideas fly directly in the face of longstanding environmental movement dogma, so we invite you to not reject or accept these ideas before really considering them in their context and in terms of their effects, and what paradigms and assumptions you are sitting in as you do so.
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Kitchen: Height Adjustable Sink

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The height adjustable sink, which uses flex hose to allow fixture movement, provides a wheelchair pull-in space beside the adjacent appliances regardless of which height those are set at, and of course access to the sink itself.

The sink will also have an additional metered faucet control. Metered faucets are those activated usually by pushing down a knob and which then run for a specific amount of time. The button or knob slowly pops up stopping water flow when it has returned to its deactivated original position. This metered control will not control a faucet that pours into this sink however. This is a manual backup for the
irrigation system for the indoor green roof (link to vignette) just beyond the top of the kitchen wall, which caps the mechanical room behind it. The primary faucet will be a sensor activated basic kitchen faucet. We will likely also provide a typical sprayer that can also be held and activated by a button on the sprayer head.

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AUTOMATION NOTE

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With the help of our accessibility automation and IOT advisor**** we will be tech-enabling as much of this as off-the-shelf AI assistants and IOT allows, but with manual operation overrides/alternatives whenever possible as well, for the sake user preferences and
instances of system failure (power or connective loss).
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PRODUCT DONATION NOTE

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Unless we get these systems donated for all needs, our plan is to demonstrate and test a variety each one of these features, and highlight them over time, sharing our findings in blogs, social media posts, and in our educational materials with local and worldwide education partners.
If you're a product manufacturer that wishes to donate your product for one or more unit or typology, and thus be highlighted in all future press and education about the project, you can contact us at the project email listed on the website. Likewise, if you'd like to sponsor one or the whole array of these innovations, feel free to contact us.
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ACCESSIBILITY PROGRESS NOTE

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The passing of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) was a watershed moment and has been critical to especially new buildings and infrastructure systems becoming more supportive to more levels and types of mobility. But the victory did seem to result in a waning of effort to keep making progress, especially with regard to considering other sorts of capability differences amongst our population. That said, in the last 10 or so years there have been many product innovations and a rekindling of the discussion about to move toward universal support of all humans, and even other living beings, in the design movement's discourse.
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Bathroom: Accessible Bath Tub

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The bathtub itself is a wheelchair-transfer walk-iIn tub with a fast fill Faucet, and massage jets. The orthopedic and quality of life benefits of this are clear. And like the pot-filler* in the kitchen space, flow-rate is irrelevant, in terms of water usage, because you'll put the same amount of water into the tub regardless of how fast it gets there. Getting it there faster will also save a small amount of energy because less heat will be lost before use.

The bathtub is set up like a peninsula extending into the bathroom instead of with its long side against a wall, as would be the typical way to place it. This is so that care-givers can access the tub from any of 3 sides, including the one where the sink is. The opposite side is the one with the door for transfer. Not only will this be much easier to get in and out for someone reliant on a wheelchair, but it will also enable a very easy transfer using the suspension system dolly**. There is also a floor drain on that side as well tied to the recirculating shower***.

Enabling this level of self care and care-giver ease is very rare, and therefore worth the additional financial cost. Most of us that are more mobile-able take for granted the luxury of being able to shower or take a bath, not only for convenience but the significant mental health benefits.

The fact that the water in this house will be unparalleled in terms of its purity also means that the steam generated in the bathroom will have far fewer contaminants, keeping the indoor air at a higher quality.

This approach is not only much safer – it’s also something that has long been out of reach for many people with mobility challenges. Bathing and showering can be too risky for them and their caregivers, largely because they only have consistent access to non-accessible bathrooms like the one shown in this image of Ron’s current setup. These are the types of facilities typically found in apartments that people with mobility impairments can afford when relying on state subsistence benefits. While programs do exist to support modifications even in rental units, landlords are often unwilling to allow them, or the small square footage and other architectural limitations make renovations cost-prohibitive.

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Planet Scale Landing Page Version

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Ramboland is a universal design and community health demonstration project and living laboratory. This site is it's digital twin. It is, and always will be in a state of becoming, like it's real-world twin. The twin's will be increasing integrated with each other and into educational programs, through onsite sensors, data streams, bioregional digital twins, human reporting, and mixed reality and large-language-model (AI) interfaces. Among many other things these will spread the word about the higher possibilities for our built environments to produce living and economic value, and support the health and wealth generation of our most neglected and abused communities. Please, join team Rambo... integrate it into your learning and teaching, donate, explore, contact us, partner, and post about it!
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Bathroom: Cool Toilet

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And then of course there is the elephant in the bathroom – the toilet. Although we will not be going with a $6,000 Japanese toilet, we will be selected one with excellent geometry for caregiver and user ease, as well as either a built-in or bolt-on bidet and tushy dryer, which are becoming readily and affordably available in the market, and a great help to everyone involved.

Flushes greywater

""Japenese"" toilet features like a bidet and dryer improve experience for both users and caregivers.

A custom designed pedal mechanism as a second option for flushing (which will simply pull down on the dual-flush flush-valve handle) improves hygiene when usable, by allowing hand contact with the fixture to be avoided. In some cases it will also improve accessibility when 1. a user has the ability to step on it but not otherwise operate a flush mechanism higher up, or 2. a user of a wheelchair can maneuver it to run over the pedal.

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Universal Design: 40" Doors

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36 inch wide doors, per the minimum requirements of ADA (link to reference), are what we call barely legal. They're just good enough, not great. Someone relying on a wheelchair can easily still lose some knuckle skin going through a 36" wide door if they're self-propelling. Because they are so common, standard doorways have an economy of scale (link to definition), and so they are cheaper than most other sizes. Despite this we felt it made sense to take a stand and specify 40" wide doors everywhere at Ramboland. Economies of scale only occur when something is legally standardized, or sells enough because of demand. Let's drive up demand for safer, better doors.

For much of the design process we have planned to provide an overhead track system to support a hanging mechanism that allows Ron, visitors, and/or future residents to be comfortably suspended, and moved easily around the house to key fixtures, appliances, furniture, etc., by a caregiver or their own control interface. Accommodating this structurally and architecturally was challenging and increasing complicatedness and cost. Getting it through doors, and to all those locations was particularly challenging. We recently expanded the track idea to go throughout the entire house however, rationalizing that the track itself was not the costly part, and it even being a somewhat fun "ride" for some fit well with the theme park implications of the project name. And yet it was still not universal in the access it granted and getting more over-the-top than might be reasonable even for this swing-for-the-fences project. And then it occurred to us that maybe we could hang the components that actually suspend our bodies from a floor-based mobile unit, something like an engine block lift. We thought this was very clever. In what couldn't even be considered an "ah ha" moment, but more like a "yeah duh" moment, we realized people make those already. Of course they do. They can fit through doors, turn and move along on casters, change height and orientation for different fixtures, furnishings, and appliances, and more. They can be operated by motor, or caregiver elbow grease.

That said, if we're not able to get the one we want, we may still modify an engine block lift! Which might actually be cooler and cheaper, and perhaps our partners who work and learn in fabrication and robotics labs might help us make that!
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Energy Delivery

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Kitchen: Height Adjustable Double Appliance

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As with our split cooktop (link to vignette) our design team, including our accessible equipment advisor, have come up with an approach to some of the appliances, which we think will increase accessibility for more folks. By placing two half-height appliances together –one above and one below a height adjustable counter section –, the full size microwave, and an oven can both become highly accessible while using up minimal space.
When the counter is raised a person using a wheelchair could also pull in under the oven, and likely reach both appliances, with really easy access to the oven. When the pair are lowered the whole way to a point at which the oven is on the floor, the microwave could be all the way down to under counter height, and easily accessed from the front, or by someone in a wheelchair who has pulled in beside it under the sink.

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Laundry - Washer/Dyer

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The washer/dryer unit is placed in the mechanical room for convenience, and shortens pipe length from treatment systems to all fixtures and appliances using treated rain for washing and irrigation. This will also slightly post/pre-heat return air before it is exhausted through an energy recovery ventilator (ERV) or cycled back into the house. This is also creating a warmer pocket of air on the northern wall, and is what's called "waste heat capture," which is good because Lancaster will remain a "heating load dominant" climate for at least the next couple of decades.
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Bathroom: The best shower in the tri-state area!

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"Recirculating shower saves 90% of energy and 85% of water compared to code. High-flow shower head for convenience and quality of life.

Many do not fully appreciate some of the luxuries and coping mechanisms we have in our society, nor realize that many don’t have safe or frequent access to them. For example, showers. In Ron’s current subsistence level living situation, it is unsafe for him to take a shower as well as it is unsafe for his caregivers to assist him during a shower. Because of that, he relies mostly on sponge bathing, as do millions of other people with limited mobility. The shower installed at Rambolandwill allow Ron (and ultimately other users) to have access to a full soaker tub with a door that allows a suspension system to carry him safely and conveniently in and out of it. The tub is positioned in such a way that caregivers can reach in from 3 of the 4 sides, a rare convenience. The bathroom will also feature a high-flow shower head next to the bathtub that he can enter independently in a wheelchair or with support of the suspension system and enjoy a better shower experience.

How does this comply with our other environmental goals? Well, the showering system we are installing is called a recirculating shower. Despite its high-flow rainforest shower head, it saves almost 90% of both water and energy compared to a code compliant 2.5 gallon per minute showerhead. This is because unlike standard showers that lose all the water and heat after it passes over our bodies and down the drain only once, water in this system will recirculate about 7 times before being drained. This is possible because the shower has built-in treatment, filtration, and temperature regulators, which also ensure cleaner water than typical tap water and allow for a perfectly controlled water temperature, making them safer in terms of burns and cold shocks – a greater risk with users that have speech challenges.

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EV Delivery Vehicle

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This is a great example of the wacky, creative contortions we find ourselves in when we audaciously step into extremely aggressive goals with a world-class team, working from regenerative thinking and integrative principles. Several of these ideas fly directly in the face of longstanding environmental movement dogma, so we invite you to not reject or accept these ideas before really considering them in terms of their effects, and what paradigms and assumptions you are sitting in as you do so.

Research (get from Noah Zallen at Introba) and projects are indicating that energy microgrids can achieve "islandable" status and produce a far smaller surplus of energy if they have massive and dynamic storage in the form of EV's that are consistently connected to them via two-way chargers. We have wanted to provide a wheelchair modified EV as part of this project all along. Now it may have even more purpose.

This insight from one of our energy engineers (Noah Zallen at Introba) triggered a set of unexpected addtional ideas with one of our civil engineers (Jim Remlin with Sherwood Design Engineers). What if we helped our YIMBY program that expanded the systems approaches to neighbors's yards could jump across streets using the EV. What if instead of direct piping from neighbors' roofs to our cisterns, we placed rain barrels at YIMBY houses on other blocks in this and other low-income neighborhoods? It could be calculated based on rainfall and roof collection areas when those barrels would be full. The EV could bring an empty barrel, and swap it for the full one, and take that water to one of our partner's sites, DECA City Farms probably, where additional food production was occurring and there may be additional water needs, or just a preference rain with some extra goodies in it plants will like, and no chlorine they won't like. Having dropped off several full rain barrels the EV van with a liftgate would be empty and able to haul crops from the other farm to either locations where canning, jarring, pickling, etc could occur, or directly to a sales point or a free distribution point like a food bank, church, park, or community center.

This torque-intensive, low-milage journey is a perfect fit for the strengths of EV's, and it would likely return to its charger at Ramboland with a lot of remaining battery charge, which if it the nanogrid decided it made sense for economic or energy resilience reasons, could power the house or charge its batteries or those batteries placed in neighboring houses to prevent refrigerated food loss or medical device power loss during a blackout.

Likewise, the EV's could actually deliver charged batteries from energy surplus producing sites, to energy deficit suffering YIMBY partners as well.

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Air Quality / Chemistry Monitoring and Treatment

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Air quality in western modernity has been a bit of a rollercoaster. Before the industrial revolution humanity had seldom (though certainly not never) produced a concentrated pollutant source consistently enough to create lasting outdoor or even indoor air quality threats or problems. Cities became incredibly polluted in the early and mid stages of industrialization, so much so that those that could live outside of them did so. Regulation and other factors that moved industry out of urban centers from urban poor, to rural poor areas, essentially diluted the contamination enough that it became somewhat less severe issues for broader areas. The Clean Air Act and its sibling Clean Water Act substantially reduced the negative impacts of industry, which had been radically disproportionately impacting poor and non-human living beings. Regulation and enforcement have continued to struggle to keep up with the propagation of new sorts of industries and their new contaminates, and other factors like corporate lobbying and politicians susceptible to it have hindered their effectiveness. But generally the arc of outdoor air quality over nearly the last century and half has been mostly a trend in the healthier direction, with ozone loss for a time, and throughout the century greenhouse gas emissions as indirect health impacts of air contamination steadily rising.

In the mid to late stages of industrialization our industries were producing new chemicals for household and other products at a rate well beyond what testing, medical and health analysis could keep pace with. Fashion trends in architecture and interior design at times exacerbated this, while health and green building rating systems at least pointed the way to often cost-effective avoidance of indoor health threats from products and materials, albeit without really moving the bell-curve of building industry practice all that much. It would be fair to say that have substantially impacted product and material manufacturing, leveraging the PR and marketing motives of building product manufacturers, though greenwashing still runs rampant. Much of these
efforts fall short of proper prioritization and accurate technical considerations however, and the air chemistry being brought to bear on Ramboland is rarified air, both literally and figuratively (sorry, couldn't resist).

By 1. maintaining a simple material palette, 2. maximizing material reuse, 3. being highly critical of chemical content in all products and materials selected, 4. resorting to new materials only when necessary and via local and scientifically validated and/or certified content, as well as 5. introducing filtration and other treatment within rooms and sometimes within HVAC systems (whichever is more effective in terms of air quality, and often also hard costs, and addressing other air quality issues like temperature and humidity as well) Ramboland will have amongst the most pristine air of any building. This 'optimization sequence' ensures maximum performance and minimal cost. Ongoing air quality testing will add insight and prompt responses to air quality impacts materials and products introduced by occupants (clothes, accessories, food, and other belongings) as well as activities like cooking, bathing, cleaning, and respirating, further strides will be made in controlling for and maintaining super healthy air quality beyond design and construction stages, in a way that can be accessed by education systems and the public at large.
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Bedroom: Convenience Vanity/Sink and Indoor Green Roof

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There is a convenience lavatory/sink in the bedroom as well – this is just that, convenience. Especially for care-givers convenience in having rapid access to a sink and faucet in the bedroom for drinking or cleanup needs. Like the kitchen sink and faucet, an additional control is included here to manage the low amounts of irrigation the indoor green roofs in both spaces will require – which will also assist in dust control on those horizontal out of reach areas, and the green roofs will help to moderate air contaminants, oxygen levels, and humidity levels, not to mention provide a biophilic (Insert definition link) psychological benefit.

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YIMBY - Energy Production

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Universal Design: Suspension System

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For much of the design process we have planned to provide an overhead track system to support a hanging mechanism that allows Ron, visitors, and/or future residents to be comfortably suspended, and moved easily around the house to key fixtures, appliances, furniture, etc., by a caregiver or their own control interface. Accommodating this structurally and architecturally was challenging and increasing complicatedness and cost. Getting it through doors, and to all those locations was particularly challenging. We recently expanded the track idea to go throughout the entire house however, rationalizing that the track itself was not the costly part, and it even being a somewhat fun ""ride"" for some fit well with the theme park implications of the project name. And yet it was still not universal in the access it granted and getting more over-the-top than might be reasonable even for this swing-for-the-fences project. And then it occurred to us that maybe we could hang the components that actually suspend our bodies from a floor-based mobile unit, something like an engine block lift. We thought this was very clever. In what couldn't even be considered an ""ah ha"" moment, but more like a ""yeah duh"" moment, we realized these make those already. Of course they do. They can fit through doors, turn and move along on casters, change height and orientation for different fixtures, furnishings, and appliances, and more. They can be operated by motor, or caregiver elbow grease.

That said, if we're not able to get the one we want, we may still modify an engine block lift! Which might actually be cooler and cheaper, and perhaps our partners who work and learn in fabrication and robotics labs might help us make that!
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Kitchen: Pull-down Upper Cabinets

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Storage can be a serious challenge in spaces with high levels of mobility accessibility. Limitations on what can be reached by various folks is not only limited, but often mutually exclusive. I.e. some folks can't reach things down low easily, others can't reach things up high, both for various reasons. Universal Design is an aspiration, a north star that perhaps can never truly be reached, but it can get us a lot of progress in checking ourselves against it, and repeatedly asking ""how can we make this better for more people?""

The kitchen at Ramboland is packed with examples of this, one of our favorites being the pull-down cabinets. There are several versions of this on the market; some allow you to pull the ""guts"" of the cabinet straight down out of the bottom of the cabinet carcass (that's what they call the outer enclosure of cabinets), so that the bottommost shelf in an upper cabinet can be the whole down at counter height, or perhaps even lower if the counter itself can also drop. Others allow those guts to both come down and forward. Still others bring the entire carcass and its guts the whole way down and to the front edge of the counter.

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Kitchen: Low Refrigeration and Dishwasher

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Nothing super innovative here, honestly. Tried and true, energy star certified under-counter freezer (left) and refrigerator (right) and dishwasher (further right, beside sink because it uses water) with a wheelchair pull-in between/beside all of them. The prep space between the two refrigeration units is set at desk height, though may be adjustable. We're leaving the space above the counter on top of the refrigerator open in case an additional refrigerator is desired, or for coffee/espresso machines, toasters, air fryer, or other small appliances.

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Kitchen: Height Adjustable Mobile Island

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The split, height adjustable, and mobile island maximizes use of space, surface activity utilization and accessibility. In order to maximize human mobility in the space we have used up a lot of extra square footage for clearance for wheelchairs, etc. This is a bit at odds with our intentions around material and energy use efficiency, because the greater space requires a larger envelope, and that also yields a greater volume of air. Together these increase both the embodied energy and energy use
during its occupancy and useful life, to run mechanical systems to supplement our passive designs, to keep the air comfortable and healthy. So, we had some making up to do by optimizing space. We sought to make both of the main rooms in the house as multi-purposeful as possible.

This one piece of furniture will allow the room to function as a large kitchen, a generous dining room, a spacious living room, a social space, and often any desired combination of these. Not only is this much more convenient and "universal." but it also helps offset the extra square footage and clearances included for mobility improvements.
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Kitchen: Custom split 4 burner induction cooktop.

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For those that have never had to worry about lateral mobility once they learned to walk, it may not be obvious why you would split a cooking range in half to put a prep space in the middle of it. Sliding back and forth laterally in a typical wheelchair is hard enough, let alone while handling sharp knives and hot pots, pans, and foods. If chefs and home cooks alike who rely on wheelchairs and can use their hands effectively can do all their prep in one position and move pots, pans, and foods on and off of induction burners without having to reach down and grab their wheels or electric chair controls to reposition over and over again, it could take a lot of the difficulty out of cooking.

Induction technology makes this easier than ever before, not to mention they are safer because the surface is not heated directly, and usually safe to the touch even immediately after or even during cooking. Most units also allow you to set an exact temperature. This is a big part of why, although some debate wages on, many of the world's most respected chefs and cooks feel that induction cooktops are the best way to go, even better than natural gas burners that introduce contaminants to the breathing zone along with the methane, which we're* finding leaks not only in our homes whether the appliances are in use or not, but throughout our cities from the gas lines. This introduces significant explosion and air quality risks, in addition to the negative environmental impacts on par or beyond any other fossil fuel**.

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Hot water system

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Recent innovations in hot water heaters have led not only to a more widely available energy efficient option than typical gas fired or even old electric water heater technology. But hot water heat pumps have also introduced a new source of cool air. As these units produce hot water buy pulling energy out of the air, they expel cooled air. In the winter this can be a bit of problem, because you’re effectively placing a small air conditioner, usually in your basement, during months you’re already spending too much energy on heating. We will exhaust this cooled air to the outside of the building in these months. But precooling the air in our mechanical room in the warmer months is a benefit.

Coupled with a few hot water solar panels on the roof, not only will we be able to produce all the hot water we need using very little energy, but we are also investigating a warmwater, subsurface irrigation system to supplement heating in the greenhouse and even extend growing seasons in outdoors raised beds. One of the many living-lab experiments we’ll be doing early on.
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YIMBY - Energy Sharing / Resilience

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Super-High Efficiency Heating/Cooling System

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Having already designed a building envelope that allows wind and sun to do more of the cooling and heating when its needed most, and as little as possible when its not wanted, the remaining heating and cooling loads (link to definition) are quite small. This “downsizing” or “right-sizing” (link to definition) allows significant cost savings, and depending on how a project decides to think about it, it could be considered to create an allowance that can be spent to get more expensive technologies - which could still cost less than typical because they’re so much smaller.
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Kitchen: Height Adjustable Mobile Island

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The split, height adjustable, and mobile island maximizes use of space, surface activity utilization and accessibility. In order to maximize human mobility in the space we have used up a lot of extra square footage for clearance for wheelchairs, etc. This is a bit at odds with our intentions around material and energy use efficiency, because the greater space requires a larger envelope, and that also yields a greater volume of air. Together these increase both the embodied energy and energy use
during its occupancy and useful life, to run mechanical systems to supplement our passive designs, to keep the air comfortable and healthy. So, we had some making up to do by optimizing space. We sought to make both of the main rooms in the house as multi-purposeful as possible.

This one piece of furniture will allow the room to function as a large kitchen, a generous dining room, a spacious living room, a social space, and often any desired combination of these. Not only is this much more convenient and "universal." but it also helps offset the extra square footage and clearances included for mobility improvements.
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Counter-intuitive / Outside the Box Thinking

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This is a great example of the outside-the-box, creative contortions we find ourselves in when we audaciously step into extremely aggressive goals with a world-class team, working from regenerative thinking and integrative principles. Several of these ideas fly directly in the face of longstanding environmental movement dogma, so we invite you to not reject or accept these ideas before really considering them in their context and in terms of their effects, and what paradigms and assumptions you are sitting in as you do so.
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Kitchen: Height Adjustable Sink

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The height adjustable sink, which uses flex hose to allow fixture movement, provides a wheelchair pull-in space beside the adjacent appliances regardless of which height those are set at, and of course access to the sink itself.

The sink will also have an additional metered faucet control. Metered faucets are those activated usually by pushing down a knob and which then run for a specific amount of time. The button or knob slowly pops up stopping water flow when it has returned to its deactivated original position. This metered control will not control a faucet that pours into this sink however. This is a manual backup for the
irrigation system for the indoor green roof (link to vignette) just beyond the top of the kitchen wall, which caps the mechanical room behind it. The primary faucet will be a sensor activated basic kitchen faucet. We will likely also provide a typical sprayer that can also be held and activated by a button on the sprayer head.

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AUTOMATION NOTE

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With the help of our accessibility automation and IOT advisor**** we will be tech-enabling as much of this as off-the-shelf AI assistants and IOT allows, but with manual operation overrides/alternatives whenever possible as well, for the sake user preferences and
instances of system failure (power or connective loss).
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PRODUCT DONATION NOTE

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Unless we get these systems donated for all needs, our plan is to demonstrate and test a variety each one of these features, and highlight them over time, sharing our findings in blogs, social media posts, and in our educational materials with local and worldwide education partners.
If you're a product manufacturer that wishes to donate your product for one or more unit or typology, and thus be highlighted in all future press and education about the project, you can contact us at the project email listed on the website. Likewise, if you'd like to sponsor one or the whole array of these innovations, feel free to contact us.
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ACCESSIBILITY PROGRESS NOTE

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The passing of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) was a watershed moment and has been critical to especially new buildings and infrastructure systems becoming more supportive to more levels and types of mobility. But the victory did seem to result in a waning of effort to keep making progress, especially with regard to considering other sorts of capability differences amongst our population. That said, in the last 10 or so years there have been many product innovations and a rekindling of the discussion about to move toward universal support of all humans, and even other living beings, in the design movement's discourse.
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Bathroom: Accessible Bath Tub

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The bathtub itself is a wheelchair-transfer walk-iIn tub with a fast fill Faucet, and massage jets. The orthopedic and quality of life benefits of this are clear. And like the pot-filler* in the kitchen space, flow-rate is irrelevant, in terms of water usage, because you'll put the same amount of water into the tub regardless of how fast it gets there. Getting it there faster will also save a small amount of energy because less heat will be lost before use.

The bathtub is set up like a peninsula extending into the bathroom instead of with its long side against a wall, as would be the typical way to place it. This is so that care-givers can access the tub from any of 3 sides, including the one where the sink is. The opposite side is the one with the door for transfer. Not only will this be much easier to get in and out for someone reliant on a wheelchair, but it will also enable a very easy transfer using the suspension system dolly**. There is also a floor drain on that side as well tied to the recirculating shower***.

Enabling this level of self care and care-giver ease is very rare, and therefore worth the additional financial cost. Most of us that are more mobile-able take for granted the luxury of being able to shower or take a bath, not only for convenience but the significant mental health benefits.

The fact that the water in this house will be unparalleled in terms of its purity also means that the steam generated in the bathroom will have far fewer contaminants, keeping the indoor air at a higher quality.

This approach is not only much safer – it’s also something that has long been out of reach for many people with mobility challenges. Bathing and showering can be too risky for them and their caregivers, largely because they only have consistent access to non-accessible bathrooms like the one shown in this image of Ron’s current setup. These are the types of facilities typically found in apartments that people with mobility impairments can afford when relying on state subsistence benefits. While programs do exist to support modifications even in rental units, landlords are often unwilling to allow them, or the small square footage and other architectural limitations make renovations cost-prohibitive.

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Planet Scale Landing Page Version

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Ramboland is a universal design and community health demonstration project and living laboratory. This site is it's digital twin. It is, and always will be in a state of becoming, like it's real-world twin. The twin's will be increasing integrated with each other and into educational programs, through onsite sensors, data streams, bioregional digital twins, human reporting, and mixed reality and large-language-model (AI) interfaces. Among many other things these will spread the word about the higher possibilities for our built environments to produce living and economic value, and support the health and wealth generation of our most neglected and abused communities. Please, join team Rambo... integrate it into your learning and teaching, donate, explore, contact us, partner, and post about it!
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Bathroom: Cool Toilet

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And then of course there is the elephant in the bathroom – the toilet. Although we will not be going with a $6,000 Japanese toilet, we will be selected one with excellent geometry for caregiver and user ease, as well as either a built-in or bolt-on bidet and tushy dryer, which are becoming readily and affordably available in the market, and a great help to everyone involved.

Flushes greywater

""Japenese"" toilet features like a bidet and dryer improve experience for both users and caregivers.

A custom designed pedal mechanism as a second option for flushing (which will simply pull down on the dual-flush flush-valve handle) improves hygiene when usable, by allowing hand contact with the fixture to be avoided. In some cases it will also improve accessibility when 1. a user has the ability to step on it but not otherwise operate a flush mechanism higher up, or 2. a user of a wheelchair can maneuver it to run over the pedal.

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Universal Design: 40" Doors

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36 inch wide doors, per the minimum requirements of ADA (link to reference), are what we call barely legal. They're just good enough, not great. Someone relying on a wheelchair can easily still lose some knuckle skin going through a 36" wide door if they're self-propelling. Because they are so common, standard doorways have an economy of scale (link to definition), and so they are cheaper than most other sizes. Despite this we felt it made sense to take a stand and specify 40" wide doors everywhere at Ramboland. Economies of scale only occur when something is legally standardized, or sells enough because of demand. Let's drive up demand for safer, better doors.

For much of the design process we have planned to provide an overhead track system to support a hanging mechanism that allows Ron, visitors, and/or future residents to be comfortably suspended, and moved easily around the house to key fixtures, appliances, furniture, etc., by a caregiver or their own control interface. Accommodating this structurally and architecturally was challenging and increasing complicatedness and cost. Getting it through doors, and to all those locations was particularly challenging. We recently expanded the track idea to go throughout the entire house however, rationalizing that the track itself was not the costly part, and it even being a somewhat fun "ride" for some fit well with the theme park implications of the project name. And yet it was still not universal in the access it granted and getting more over-the-top than might be reasonable even for this swing-for-the-fences project. And then it occurred to us that maybe we could hang the components that actually suspend our bodies from a floor-based mobile unit, something like an engine block lift. We thought this was very clever. In what couldn't even be considered an "ah ha" moment, but more like a "yeah duh" moment, we realized people make those already. Of course they do. They can fit through doors, turn and move along on casters, change height and orientation for different fixtures, furnishings, and appliances, and more. They can be operated by motor, or caregiver elbow grease.

That said, if we're not able to get the one we want, we may still modify an engine block lift! Which might actually be cooler and cheaper, and perhaps our partners who work and learn in fabrication and robotics labs might help us make that!
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Energy Delivery

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Kitchen: Height Adjustable Double Appliance

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As with our split cooktop (link to vignette) our design team, including our accessible equipment advisor, have come up with an approach to some of the appliances, which we think will increase accessibility for more folks. By placing two half-height appliances together –one above and one below a height adjustable counter section –, the full size microwave, and an oven can both become highly accessible while using up minimal space.
When the counter is raised a person using a wheelchair could also pull in under the oven, and likely reach both appliances, with really easy access to the oven. When the pair are lowered the whole way to a point at which the oven is on the floor, the microwave could be all the way down to under counter height, and easily accessed from the front, or by someone in a wheelchair who has pulled in beside it under the sink.

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Laundry - Washer/Dyer

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The washer/dryer unit is placed in the mechanical room for convenience, and shortens pipe length from treatment systems to all fixtures and appliances using treated rain for washing and irrigation. This will also slightly post/pre-heat return air before it is exhausted through an energy recovery ventilator (ERV) or cycled back into the house. This is also creating a warmer pocket of air on the northern wall, and is what's called "waste heat capture," which is good because Lancaster will remain a "heating load dominant" climate for at least the next couple of decades.
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Bathroom: The best shower in the tri-state area!

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"Recirculating shower saves 90% of energy and 85% of water compared to code. High-flow shower head for convenience and quality of life.

Many do not fully appreciate some of the luxuries and coping mechanisms we have in our society, nor realize that many don’t have safe or frequent access to them. For example, showers. In Ron’s current subsistence level living situation, it is unsafe for him to take a shower as well as it is unsafe for his caregivers to assist him during a shower. Because of that, he relies mostly on sponge bathing, as do millions of other people with limited mobility. The shower installed at Rambolandwill allow Ron (and ultimately other users) to have access to a full soaker tub with a door that allows a suspension system to carry him safely and conveniently in and out of it. The tub is positioned in such a way that caregivers can reach in from 3 of the 4 sides, a rare convenience. The bathroom will also feature a high-flow shower head next to the bathtub that he can enter independently in a wheelchair or with support of the suspension system and enjoy a better shower experience.

How does this comply with our other environmental goals? Well, the showering system we are installing is called a recirculating shower. Despite its high-flow rainforest shower head, it saves almost 90% of both water and energy compared to a code compliant 2.5 gallon per minute showerhead. This is because unlike standard showers that lose all the water and heat after it passes over our bodies and down the drain only once, water in this system will recirculate about 7 times before being drained. This is possible because the shower has built-in treatment, filtration, and temperature regulators, which also ensure cleaner water than typical tap water and allow for a perfectly controlled water temperature, making them safer in terms of burns and cold shocks – a greater risk with users that have speech challenges.

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EV Delivery Vehicle

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This is a great example of the wacky, creative contortions we find ourselves in when we audaciously step into extremely aggressive goals with a world-class team, working from regenerative thinking and integrative principles. Several of these ideas fly directly in the face of longstanding environmental movement dogma, so we invite you to not reject or accept these ideas before really considering them in terms of their effects, and what paradigms and assumptions you are sitting in as you do so.

Research (get from Noah Zallen at Introba) and projects are indicating that energy microgrids can achieve "islandable" status and produce a far smaller surplus of energy if they have massive and dynamic storage in the form of EV's that are consistently connected to them via two-way chargers. We have wanted to provide a wheelchair modified EV as part of this project all along. Now it may have even more purpose.

This insight from one of our energy engineers (Noah Zallen at Introba) triggered a set of unexpected addtional ideas with one of our civil engineers (Jim Remlin with Sherwood Design Engineers). What if we helped our YIMBY program that expanded the systems approaches to neighbors's yards could jump across streets using the EV. What if instead of direct piping from neighbors' roofs to our cisterns, we placed rain barrels at YIMBY houses on other blocks in this and other low-income neighborhoods? It could be calculated based on rainfall and roof collection areas when those barrels would be full. The EV could bring an empty barrel, and swap it for the full one, and take that water to one of our partner's sites, DECA City Farms probably, where additional food production was occurring and there may be additional water needs, or just a preference rain with some extra goodies in it plants will like, and no chlorine they won't like. Having dropped off several full rain barrels the EV van with a liftgate would be empty and able to haul crops from the other farm to either locations where canning, jarring, pickling, etc could occur, or directly to a sales point or a free distribution point like a food bank, church, park, or community center.

This torque-intensive, low-milage journey is a perfect fit for the strengths of EV's, and it would likely return to its charger at Ramboland with a lot of remaining battery charge, which if it the nanogrid decided it made sense for economic or energy resilience reasons, could power the house or charge its batteries or those batteries placed in neighboring houses to prevent refrigerated food loss or medical device power loss during a blackout.

Likewise, the EV's could actually deliver charged batteries from energy surplus producing sites, to energy deficit suffering YIMBY partners as well.

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Air Quality / Chemistry Monitoring and Treatment

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Air quality in western modernity has been a bit of a rollercoaster. Before the industrial revolution humanity had seldom (though certainly not never) produced a concentrated pollutant source consistently enough to create lasting outdoor or even indoor air quality threats or problems. Cities became incredibly polluted in the early and mid stages of industrialization, so much so that those that could live outside of them did so. Regulation and other factors that moved industry out of urban centers from urban poor, to rural poor areas, essentially diluted the contamination enough that it became somewhat less severe issues for broader areas. The Clean Air Act and its sibling Clean Water Act substantially reduced the negative impacts of industry, which had been radically disproportionately impacting poor and non-human living beings. Regulation and enforcement have continued to struggle to keep up with the propagation of new sorts of industries and their new contaminates, and other factors like corporate lobbying and politicians susceptible to it have hindered their effectiveness. But generally the arc of outdoor air quality over nearly the last century and half has been mostly a trend in the healthier direction, with ozone loss for a time, and throughout the century greenhouse gas emissions as indirect health impacts of air contamination steadily rising.

In the mid to late stages of industrialization our industries were producing new chemicals for household and other products at a rate well beyond what testing, medical and health analysis could keep pace with. Fashion trends in architecture and interior design at times exacerbated this, while health and green building rating systems at least pointed the way to often cost-effective avoidance of indoor health threats from products and materials, albeit without really moving the bell-curve of building industry practice all that much. It would be fair to say that have substantially impacted product and material manufacturing, leveraging the PR and marketing motives of building product manufacturers, though greenwashing still runs rampant. Much of these
efforts fall short of proper prioritization and accurate technical considerations however, and the air chemistry being brought to bear on Ramboland is rarified air, both literally and figuratively (sorry, couldn't resist).

By 1. maintaining a simple material palette, 2. maximizing material reuse, 3. being highly critical of chemical content in all products and materials selected, 4. resorting to new materials only when necessary and via local and scientifically validated and/or certified content, as well as 5. introducing filtration and other treatment within rooms and sometimes within HVAC systems (whichever is more effective in terms of air quality, and often also hard costs, and addressing other air quality issues like temperature and humidity as well) Ramboland will have amongst the most pristine air of any building. This 'optimization sequence' ensures maximum performance and minimal cost. Ongoing air quality testing will add insight and prompt responses to air quality impacts materials and products introduced by occupants (clothes, accessories, food, and other belongings) as well as activities like cooking, bathing, cleaning, and respirating, further strides will be made in controlling for and maintaining super healthy air quality beyond design and construction stages, in a way that can be accessed by education systems and the public at large.
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Bedroom: Convenience Vanity/Sink and Indoor Green Roof

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There is a convenience lavatory/sink in the bedroom as well – this is just that, convenience. Especially for care-givers convenience in having rapid access to a sink and faucet in the bedroom for drinking or cleanup needs. Like the kitchen sink and faucet, an additional control is included here to manage the low amounts of irrigation the indoor green roofs in both spaces will require – which will also assist in dust control on those horizontal out of reach areas, and the green roofs will help to moderate air contaminants, oxygen levels, and humidity levels, not to mention provide a biophilic (Insert definition link) psychological benefit.

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YIMBY - Energy Production

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Universal Design: Suspension System

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For much of the design process we have planned to provide an overhead track system to support a hanging mechanism that allows Ron, visitors, and/or future residents to be comfortably suspended, and moved easily around the house to key fixtures, appliances, furniture, etc., by a caregiver or their own control interface. Accommodating this structurally and architecturally was challenging and increasing complicatedness and cost. Getting it through doors, and to all those locations was particularly challenging. We recently expanded the track idea to go throughout the entire house however, rationalizing that the track itself was not the costly part, and it even being a somewhat fun ""ride"" for some fit well with the theme park implications of the project name. And yet it was still not universal in the access it granted and getting more over-the-top than might be reasonable even for this swing-for-the-fences project. And then it occurred to us that maybe we could hang the components that actually suspend our bodies from a floor-based mobile unit, something like an engine block lift. We thought this was very clever. In what couldn't even be considered an ""ah ha"" moment, but more like a ""yeah duh"" moment, we realized these make those already. Of course they do. They can fit through doors, turn and move along on casters, change height and orientation for different fixtures, furnishings, and appliances, and more. They can be operated by motor, or caregiver elbow grease.

That said, if we're not able to get the one we want, we may still modify an engine block lift! Which might actually be cooler and cheaper, and perhaps our partners who work and learn in fabrication and robotics labs might help us make that!
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Kitchen: Pull-down Upper Cabinets

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Storage can be a serious challenge in spaces with high levels of mobility accessibility. Limitations on what can be reached by various folks is not only limited, but often mutually exclusive. I.e. some folks can't reach things down low easily, others can't reach things up high, both for various reasons. Universal Design is an aspiration, a north star that perhaps can never truly be reached, but it can get us a lot of progress in checking ourselves against it, and repeatedly asking ""how can we make this better for more people?""

The kitchen at Ramboland is packed with examples of this, one of our favorites being the pull-down cabinets. There are several versions of this on the market; some allow you to pull the ""guts"" of the cabinet straight down out of the bottom of the cabinet carcass (that's what they call the outer enclosure of cabinets), so that the bottommost shelf in an upper cabinet can be the whole down at counter height, or perhaps even lower if the counter itself can also drop. Others allow those guts to both come down and forward. Still others bring the entire carcass and its guts the whole way down and to the front edge of the counter.

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Kitchen: Low Refrigeration and Dishwasher

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Nothing super innovative here, honestly. Tried and true, energy star certified under-counter freezer (left) and refrigerator (right) and dishwasher (further right, beside sink because it uses water) with a wheelchair pull-in between/beside all of them. The prep space between the two refrigeration units is set at desk height, though may be adjustable. We're leaving the space above the counter on top of the refrigerator open in case an additional refrigerator is desired, or for coffee/espresso machines, toasters, air fryer, or other small appliances.

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Kitchen: Custom split 4 burner induction cooktop.

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For those that have never had to worry about lateral mobility once they learned to walk, it may not be obvious why you would split a cooking range in half to put a prep space in the middle of it. Sliding back and forth laterally in a typical wheelchair is hard enough, let alone while handling sharp knives and hot pots, pans, and foods. If chefs and home cooks alike who rely on wheelchairs and can use their hands effectively can do all their prep in one position and move pots, pans, and foods on and off of induction burners without having to reach down and grab their wheels or electric chair controls to reposition over and over again, it could take a lot of the difficulty out of cooking.

Induction technology makes this easier than ever before, not to mention they are safer because the surface is not heated directly, and usually safe to the touch even immediately after or even during cooking. Most units also allow you to set an exact temperature. This is a big part of why, although some debate wages on, many of the world's most respected chefs and cooks feel that induction cooktops are the best way to go, even better than natural gas burners that introduce contaminants to the breathing zone along with the methane, which we're* finding leaks not only in our homes whether the appliances are in use or not, but throughout our cities from the gas lines. This introduces significant explosion and air quality risks, in addition to the negative environmental impacts on par or beyond any other fossil fuel**.

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Hot water system

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Recent innovations in hot water heaters have led not only to a more widely available energy efficient option than typical gas fired or even old electric water heater technology. But hot water heat pumps have also introduced a new source of cool air. As these units produce hot water buy pulling energy out of the air, they expel cooled air. In the winter this can be a bit of problem, because you’re effectively placing a small air conditioner, usually in your basement, during months you’re already spending too much energy on heating. We will exhaust this cooled air to the outside of the building in these months. But precooling the air in our mechanical room in the warmer months is a benefit.

Coupled with a few hot water solar panels on the roof, not only will we be able to produce all the hot water we need using very little energy, but we are also investigating a warmwater, subsurface irrigation system to supplement heating in the greenhouse and even extend growing seasons in outdoors raised beds. One of the many living-lab experiments we’ll be doing early on.
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YIMBY - Energy Sharing / Resilience

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Super-High Efficiency Heating/Cooling System

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Having already designed a building envelope that allows wind and sun to do more of the cooling and heating when its needed most, and as little as possible when its not wanted, the remaining heating and cooling loads (link to definition) are quite small. This “downsizing” or “right-sizing” (link to definition) allows significant cost savings, and depending on how a project decides to think about it, it could be considered to create an allowance that can be spent to get more expensive technologies - which could still cost less than typical because they’re so much smaller.
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Counter-intuitive / Outside the Box Thinking

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This is a great example of the outside-the-box, creative contortions we find ourselves in when we audaciously step into extremely aggressive goals with a world-class team, working from regenerative thinking and integrative principles. Several of these ideas fly directly in the face of longstanding environmental movement dogma, so we invite you to not reject or accept these ideas before really considering them in their context and in terms of their effects, and what paradigms and assumptions you are sitting in as you do so.
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Kitchen: Height Adjustable Sink

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The height adjustable sink, which uses flex hose to allow fixture movement, provides a wheelchair pull-in space beside the adjacent appliances regardless of which height those are set at, and of course access to the sink itself.

The sink will also have an additional metered faucet control. Metered faucets are those activated usually by pushing down a knob and which then run for a specific amount of time. The button or knob slowly pops up stopping water flow when it has returned to its deactivated original position. This metered control will not control a faucet that pours into this sink however. This is a manual backup for the
irrigation system for the indoor green roof (link to vignette) just beyond the top of the kitchen wall, which caps the mechanical room behind it. The primary faucet will be a sensor activated basic kitchen faucet. We will likely also provide a typical sprayer that can also be held and activated by a button on the sprayer head.

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AUTOMATION NOTE

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With the help of our accessibility automation and IOT advisor**** we will be tech-enabling as much of this as off-the-shelf AI assistants and IOT allows, but with manual operation overrides/alternatives whenever possible as well, for the sake user preferences and
instances of system failure (power or connective loss).
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PRODUCT DONATION NOTE

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Unless we get these systems donated for all needs, our plan is to demonstrate and test a variety each one of these features, and highlight them over time, sharing our findings in blogs, social media posts, and in our educational materials with local and worldwide education partners.
If you're a product manufacturer that wishes to donate your product for one or more unit or typology, and thus be highlighted in all future press and education about the project, you can contact us at the project email listed on the website. Likewise, if you'd like to sponsor one or the whole array of these innovations, feel free to contact us.
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ACCESSIBILITY PROGRESS NOTE

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The passing of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) was a watershed moment and has been critical to especially new buildings and infrastructure systems becoming more supportive to more levels and types of mobility. But the victory did seem to result in a waning of effort to keep making progress, especially with regard to considering other sorts of capability differences amongst our population. That said, in the last 10 or so years there have been many product innovations and a rekindling of the discussion about to move toward universal support of all humans, and even other living beings, in the design movement's discourse.
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Bathroom: Accessible Bath Tub

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The bathtub itself is a wheelchair-transfer walk-iIn tub with a fast fill Faucet, and massage jets. The orthopedic and quality of life benefits of this are clear. And like the pot-filler* in the kitchen space, flow-rate is irrelevant, in terms of water usage, because you'll put the same amount of water into the tub regardless of how fast it gets there. Getting it there faster will also save a small amount of energy because less heat will be lost before use.

The bathtub is set up like a peninsula extending into the bathroom instead of with its long side against a wall, as would be the typical way to place it. This is so that care-givers can access the tub from any of 3 sides, including the one where the sink is. The opposite side is the one with the door for transfer. Not only will this be much easier to get in and out for someone reliant on a wheelchair, but it will also enable a very easy transfer using the suspension system dolly**. There is also a floor drain on that side as well tied to the recirculating shower***.

Enabling this level of self care and care-giver ease is very rare, and therefore worth the additional financial cost. Most of us that are more mobile-able take for granted the luxury of being able to shower or take a bath, not only for convenience but the significant mental health benefits.

The fact that the water in this house will be unparalleled in terms of its purity also means that the steam generated in the bathroom will have far fewer contaminants, keeping the indoor air at a higher quality.

This approach is not only much safer – it’s also something that has long been out of reach for many people with mobility challenges. Bathing and showering can be too risky for them and their caregivers, largely because they only have consistent access to non-accessible bathrooms like the one shown in this image of Ron’s current setup. These are the types of facilities typically found in apartments that people with mobility impairments can afford when relying on state subsistence benefits. While programs do exist to support modifications even in rental units, landlords are often unwilling to allow them, or the small square footage and other architectural limitations make renovations cost-prohibitive.

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Planet Scale Landing Page Version

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Ramboland is a universal design and community health demonstration project and living laboratory. This site is it's digital twin. It is, and always will be in a state of becoming, like it's real-world twin. The twin's will be increasing integrated with each other and into educational programs, through onsite sensors, data streams, bioregional digital twins, human reporting, and mixed reality and large-language-model (AI) interfaces. Among many other things these will spread the word about the higher possibilities for our built environments to produce living and economic value, and support the health and wealth generation of our most neglected and abused communities. Please, join team Rambo... integrate it into your learning and teaching, donate, explore, contact us, partner, and post about it!
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Bathroom: Cool Toilet

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And then of course there is the elephant in the bathroom – the toilet. Although we will not be going with a $6,000 Japanese toilet, we will be selected one with excellent geometry for caregiver and user ease, as well as either a built-in or bolt-on bidet and tushy dryer, which are becoming readily and affordably available in the market, and a great help to everyone involved.

Flushes greywater

""Japenese"" toilet features like a bidet and dryer improve experience for both users and caregivers.

A custom designed pedal mechanism as a second option for flushing (which will simply pull down on the dual-flush flush-valve handle) improves hygiene when usable, by allowing hand contact with the fixture to be avoided. In some cases it will also improve accessibility when 1. a user has the ability to step on it but not otherwise operate a flush mechanism higher up, or 2. a user of a wheelchair can maneuver it to run over the pedal.

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Universal Design: 40" Doors

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36 inch wide doors, per the minimum requirements of ADA (link to reference), are what we call barely legal. They're just good enough, not great. Someone relying on a wheelchair can easily still lose some knuckle skin going through a 36" wide door if they're self-propelling. Because they are so common, standard doorways have an economy of scale (link to definition), and so they are cheaper than most other sizes. Despite this we felt it made sense to take a stand and specify 40" wide doors everywhere at Ramboland. Economies of scale only occur when something is legally standardized, or sells enough because of demand. Let's drive up demand for safer, better doors.

For much of the design process we have planned to provide an overhead track system to support a hanging mechanism that allows Ron, visitors, and/or future residents to be comfortably suspended, and moved easily around the house to key fixtures, appliances, furniture, etc., by a caregiver or their own control interface. Accommodating this structurally and architecturally was challenging and increasing complicatedness and cost. Getting it through doors, and to all those locations was particularly challenging. We recently expanded the track idea to go throughout the entire house however, rationalizing that the track itself was not the costly part, and it even being a somewhat fun "ride" for some fit well with the theme park implications of the project name. And yet it was still not universal in the access it granted and getting more over-the-top than might be reasonable even for this swing-for-the-fences project. And then it occurred to us that maybe we could hang the components that actually suspend our bodies from a floor-based mobile unit, something like an engine block lift. We thought this was very clever. In what couldn't even be considered an "ah ha" moment, but more like a "yeah duh" moment, we realized people make those already. Of course they do. They can fit through doors, turn and move along on casters, change height and orientation for different fixtures, furnishings, and appliances, and more. They can be operated by motor, or caregiver elbow grease.

That said, if we're not able to get the one we want, we may still modify an engine block lift! Which might actually be cooler and cheaper, and perhaps our partners who work and learn in fabrication and robotics labs might help us make that!
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Energy Delivery

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Kitchen: Height Adjustable Double Appliance

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As with our split cooktop (link to vignette) our design team, including our accessible equipment advisor, have come up with an approach to some of the appliances, which we think will increase accessibility for more folks. By placing two half-height appliances together –one above and one below a height adjustable counter section –, the full size microwave, and an oven can both become highly accessible while using up minimal space.
When the counter is raised a person using a wheelchair could also pull in under the oven, and likely reach both appliances, with really easy access to the oven. When the pair are lowered the whole way to a point at which the oven is on the floor, the microwave could be all the way down to under counter height, and easily accessed from the front, or by someone in a wheelchair who has pulled in beside it under the sink.

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Laundry - Washer/Dyer

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The washer/dryer unit is placed in the mechanical room for convenience, and shortens pipe length from treatment systems to all fixtures and appliances using treated rain for washing and irrigation. This will also slightly post/pre-heat return air before it is exhausted through an energy recovery ventilator (ERV) or cycled back into the house. This is also creating a warmer pocket of air on the northern wall, and is what's called "waste heat capture," which is good because Lancaster will remain a "heating load dominant" climate for at least the next couple of decades.
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Bathroom: The best shower in the tri-state area!

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"Recirculating shower saves 90% of energy and 85% of water compared to code. High-flow shower head for convenience and quality of life.

Many do not fully appreciate some of the luxuries and coping mechanisms we have in our society, nor realize that many don’t have safe or frequent access to them. For example, showers. In Ron’s current subsistence level living situation, it is unsafe for him to take a shower as well as it is unsafe for his caregivers to assist him during a shower. Because of that, he relies mostly on sponge bathing, as do millions of other people with limited mobility. The shower installed at Rambolandwill allow Ron (and ultimately other users) to have access to a full soaker tub with a door that allows a suspension system to carry him safely and conveniently in and out of it. The tub is positioned in such a way that caregivers can reach in from 3 of the 4 sides, a rare convenience. The bathroom will also feature a high-flow shower head next to the bathtub that he can enter independently in a wheelchair or with support of the suspension system and enjoy a better shower experience.

How does this comply with our other environmental goals? Well, the showering system we are installing is called a recirculating shower. Despite its high-flow rainforest shower head, it saves almost 90% of both water and energy compared to a code compliant 2.5 gallon per minute showerhead. This is because unlike standard showers that lose all the water and heat after it passes over our bodies and down the drain only once, water in this system will recirculate about 7 times before being drained. This is possible because the shower has built-in treatment, filtration, and temperature regulators, which also ensure cleaner water than typical tap water and allow for a perfectly controlled water temperature, making them safer in terms of burns and cold shocks – a greater risk with users that have speech challenges.

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EV Delivery Vehicle

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This is a great example of the wacky, creative contortions we find ourselves in when we audaciously step into extremely aggressive goals with a world-class team, working from regenerative thinking and integrative principles. Several of these ideas fly directly in the face of longstanding environmental movement dogma, so we invite you to not reject or accept these ideas before really considering them in terms of their effects, and what paradigms and assumptions you are sitting in as you do so.

Research (get from Noah Zallen at Introba) and projects are indicating that energy microgrids can achieve "islandable" status and produce a far smaller surplus of energy if they have massive and dynamic storage in the form of EV's that are consistently connected to them via two-way chargers. We have wanted to provide a wheelchair modified EV as part of this project all along. Now it may have even more purpose.

This insight from one of our energy engineers (Noah Zallen at Introba) triggered a set of unexpected addtional ideas with one of our civil engineers (Jim Remlin with Sherwood Design Engineers). What if we helped our YIMBY program that expanded the systems approaches to neighbors's yards could jump across streets using the EV. What if instead of direct piping from neighbors' roofs to our cisterns, we placed rain barrels at YIMBY houses on other blocks in this and other low-income neighborhoods? It could be calculated based on rainfall and roof collection areas when those barrels would be full. The EV could bring an empty barrel, and swap it for the full one, and take that water to one of our partner's sites, DECA City Farms probably, where additional food production was occurring and there may be additional water needs, or just a preference rain with some extra goodies in it plants will like, and no chlorine they won't like. Having dropped off several full rain barrels the EV van with a liftgate would be empty and able to haul crops from the other farm to either locations where canning, jarring, pickling, etc could occur, or directly to a sales point or a free distribution point like a food bank, church, park, or community center.

This torque-intensive, low-milage journey is a perfect fit for the strengths of EV's, and it would likely return to its charger at Ramboland with a lot of remaining battery charge, which if it the nanogrid decided it made sense for economic or energy resilience reasons, could power the house or charge its batteries or those batteries placed in neighboring houses to prevent refrigerated food loss or medical device power loss during a blackout.

Likewise, the EV's could actually deliver charged batteries from energy surplus producing sites, to energy deficit suffering YIMBY partners as well.

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Air Quality / Chemistry Monitoring and Treatment

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Air quality in western modernity has been a bit of a rollercoaster. Before the industrial revolution humanity had seldom (though certainly not never) produced a concentrated pollutant source consistently enough to create lasting outdoor or even indoor air quality threats or problems. Cities became incredibly polluted in the early and mid stages of industrialization, so much so that those that could live outside of them did so. Regulation and other factors that moved industry out of urban centers from urban poor, to rural poor areas, essentially diluted the contamination enough that it became somewhat less severe issues for broader areas. The Clean Air Act and its sibling Clean Water Act substantially reduced the negative impacts of industry, which had been radically disproportionately impacting poor and non-human living beings. Regulation and enforcement have continued to struggle to keep up with the propagation of new sorts of industries and their new contaminates, and other factors like corporate lobbying and politicians susceptible to it have hindered their effectiveness. But generally the arc of outdoor air quality over nearly the last century and half has been mostly a trend in the healthier direction, with ozone loss for a time, and throughout the century greenhouse gas emissions as indirect health impacts of air contamination steadily rising.

In the mid to late stages of industrialization our industries were producing new chemicals for household and other products at a rate well beyond what testing, medical and health analysis could keep pace with. Fashion trends in architecture and interior design at times exacerbated this, while health and green building rating systems at least pointed the way to often cost-effective avoidance of indoor health threats from products and materials, albeit without really moving the bell-curve of building industry practice all that much. It would be fair to say that have substantially impacted product and material manufacturing, leveraging the PR and marketing motives of building product manufacturers, though greenwashing still runs rampant. Much of these
efforts fall short of proper prioritization and accurate technical considerations however, and the air chemistry being brought to bear on Ramboland is rarified air, both literally and figuratively (sorry, couldn't resist).

By 1. maintaining a simple material palette, 2. maximizing material reuse, 3. being highly critical of chemical content in all products and materials selected, 4. resorting to new materials only when necessary and via local and scientifically validated and/or certified content, as well as 5. introducing filtration and other treatment within rooms and sometimes within HVAC systems (whichever is more effective in terms of air quality, and often also hard costs, and addressing other air quality issues like temperature and humidity as well) Ramboland will have amongst the most pristine air of any building. This 'optimization sequence' ensures maximum performance and minimal cost. Ongoing air quality testing will add insight and prompt responses to air quality impacts materials and products introduced by occupants (clothes, accessories, food, and other belongings) as well as activities like cooking, bathing, cleaning, and respirating, further strides will be made in controlling for and maintaining super healthy air quality beyond design and construction stages, in a way that can be accessed by education systems and the public at large.
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Bedroom: Convenience Vanity/Sink and Indoor Green Roof

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There is a convenience lavatory/sink in the bedroom as well – this is just that, convenience. Especially for care-givers convenience in having rapid access to a sink and faucet in the bedroom for drinking or cleanup needs. Like the kitchen sink and faucet, an additional control is included here to manage the low amounts of irrigation the indoor green roofs in both spaces will require – which will also assist in dust control on those horizontal out of reach areas, and the green roofs will help to moderate air contaminants, oxygen levels, and humidity levels, not to mention provide a biophilic (Insert definition link) psychological benefit.

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YIMBY - Energy Production

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Universal Design: Suspension System

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For much of the design process we have planned to provide an overhead track system to support a hanging mechanism that allows Ron, visitors, and/or future residents to be comfortably suspended, and moved easily around the house to key fixtures, appliances, furniture, etc., by a caregiver or their own control interface. Accommodating this structurally and architecturally was challenging and increasing complicatedness and cost. Getting it through doors, and to all those locations was particularly challenging. We recently expanded the track idea to go throughout the entire house however, rationalizing that the track itself was not the costly part, and it even being a somewhat fun ""ride"" for some fit well with the theme park implications of the project name. And yet it was still not universal in the access it granted and getting more over-the-top than might be reasonable even for this swing-for-the-fences project. And then it occurred to us that maybe we could hang the components that actually suspend our bodies from a floor-based mobile unit, something like an engine block lift. We thought this was very clever. In what couldn't even be considered an ""ah ha"" moment, but more like a ""yeah duh"" moment, we realized these make those already. Of course they do. They can fit through doors, turn and move along on casters, change height and orientation for different fixtures, furnishings, and appliances, and more. They can be operated by motor, or caregiver elbow grease.

That said, if we're not able to get the one we want, we may still modify an engine block lift! Which might actually be cooler and cheaper, and perhaps our partners who work and learn in fabrication and robotics labs might help us make that!
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Kitchen: Pull-down Upper Cabinets

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Storage can be a serious challenge in spaces with high levels of mobility accessibility. Limitations on what can be reached by various folks is not only limited, but often mutually exclusive. I.e. some folks can't reach things down low easily, others can't reach things up high, both for various reasons. Universal Design is an aspiration, a north star that perhaps can never truly be reached, but it can get us a lot of progress in checking ourselves against it, and repeatedly asking ""how can we make this better for more people?""

The kitchen at Ramboland is packed with examples of this, one of our favorites being the pull-down cabinets. There are several versions of this on the market; some allow you to pull the ""guts"" of the cabinet straight down out of the bottom of the cabinet carcass (that's what they call the outer enclosure of cabinets), so that the bottommost shelf in an upper cabinet can be the whole down at counter height, or perhaps even lower if the counter itself can also drop. Others allow those guts to both come down and forward. Still others bring the entire carcass and its guts the whole way down and to the front edge of the counter.

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Kitchen: Low Refrigeration and Dishwasher

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Nothing super innovative here, honestly. Tried and true, energy star certified under-counter freezer (left) and refrigerator (right) and dishwasher (further right, beside sink because it uses water) with a wheelchair pull-in between/beside all of them. The prep space between the two refrigeration units is set at desk height, though may be adjustable. We're leaving the space above the counter on top of the refrigerator open in case an additional refrigerator is desired, or for coffee/espresso machines, toasters, air fryer, or other small appliances.

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Kitchen: Height Adjustable Mobile Island

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The split, height adjustable, and mobile island maximizes use of space, surface activity utilization and accessibility. In order to maximize human mobility in the space we have used up a lot of extra square footage for clearance for wheelchairs, etc. This is a bit at odds with our intentions around material and energy use efficiency, because the greater space requires a larger envelope, and that also yields a greater volume of air. Together these increase both the embodied energy and energy use
during its occupancy and useful life, to run mechanical systems to supplement our passive designs, to keep the air comfortable and healthy. So, we had some making up to do by optimizing space. We sought to make both of the main rooms in the house as multi-purposeful as possible.

This one piece of furniture will allow the room to function as a large kitchen, a generous dining room, a spacious living room, a social space, and often any desired combination of these. Not only is this much more convenient and "universal." but it also helps offset the extra square footage and clearances included for mobility improvements.
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Kitchen: Custom split 4 burner induction cooktop.

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For those that have never had to worry about lateral mobility once they learned to walk, it may not be obvious why you would split a cooking range in half to put a prep space in the middle of it. Sliding back and forth laterally in a typical wheelchair is hard enough, let alone while handling sharp knives and hot pots, pans, and foods. If chefs and home cooks alike who rely on wheelchairs and can use their hands effectively can do all their prep in one position and move pots, pans, and foods on and off of induction burners without having to reach down and grab their wheels or electric chair controls to reposition over and over again, it could take a lot of the difficulty out of cooking.

Induction technology makes this easier than ever before, not to mention they are safer because the surface is not heated directly, and usually safe to the touch even immediately after or even during cooking. Most units also allow you to set an exact temperature. This is a big part of why, although some debate wages on, many of the world's most respected chefs and cooks feel that induction cooktops are the best way to go, even better than natural gas burners that introduce contaminants to the breathing zone along with the methane, which we're* finding leaks not only in our homes whether the appliances are in use or not, but throughout our cities from the gas lines. This introduces significant explosion and air quality risks, in addition to the negative environmental impacts on par or beyond any other fossil fuel**.

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Hot water system

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Recent innovations in hot water heaters have led not only to a more widely available energy efficient option than typical gas fired or even old electric water heater technology. But hot water heat pumps have also introduced a new source of cool air. As these units produce hot water buy pulling energy out of the air, they expel cooled air. In the winter this can be a bit of problem, because you’re effectively placing a small air conditioner, usually in your basement, during months you’re already spending too much energy on heating. We will exhaust this cooled air to the outside of the building in these months. But precooling the air in our mechanical room in the warmer months is a benefit.

Coupled with a few hot water solar panels on the roof, not only will we be able to produce all the hot water we need using very little energy, but we are also investigating a warmwater, subsurface irrigation system to supplement heating in the greenhouse and even extend growing seasons in outdoors raised beds. One of the many living-lab experiments we’ll be doing early on.
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YIMBY - Energy Sharing / Resilience

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Super-High Efficiency Heating/Cooling System

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Having already designed a building envelope that allows wind and sun to do more of the cooling and heating when its needed most, and as little as possible when its not wanted, the remaining heating and cooling loads (link to definition) are quite small. This “downsizing” or “right-sizing” (link to definition) allows significant cost savings, and depending on how a project decides to think about it, it could be considered to create an allowance that can be spent to get more expensive technologies - which could still cost less than typical because they’re so much smaller.
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Counter-intuitive / Outside the Box Thinking

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This is a great example of the outside-the-box, creative contortions we find ourselves in when we audaciously step into extremely aggressive goals with a world-class team, working from regenerative thinking and integrative principles. Several of these ideas fly directly in the face of longstanding environmental movement dogma, so we invite you to not reject or accept these ideas before really considering them in their context and in terms of their effects, and what paradigms and assumptions you are sitting in as you do so.
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Kitchen: Height Adjustable Sink

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The height adjustable sink, which uses flex hose to allow fixture movement, provides a wheelchair pull-in space beside the adjacent appliances regardless of which height those are set at, and of course access to the sink itself.

The sink will also have an additional metered faucet control. Metered faucets are those activated usually by pushing down a knob and which then run for a specific amount of time. The button or knob slowly pops up stopping water flow when it has returned to its deactivated original position. This metered control will not control a faucet that pours into this sink however. This is a manual backup for the
irrigation system for the indoor green roof (link to vignette) just beyond the top of the kitchen wall, which caps the mechanical room behind it. The primary faucet will be a sensor activated basic kitchen faucet. We will likely also provide a typical sprayer that can also be held and activated by a button on the sprayer head.

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AUTOMATION NOTE

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With the help of our accessibility automation and IOT advisor**** we will be tech-enabling as much of this as off-the-shelf AI assistants and IOT allows, but with manual operation overrides/alternatives whenever possible as well, for the sake user preferences and
instances of system failure (power or connective loss).
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PRODUCT DONATION NOTE

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Unless we get these systems donated for all needs, our plan is to demonstrate and test a variety each one of these features, and highlight them over time, sharing our findings in blogs, social media posts, and in our educational materials with local and worldwide education partners.
If you're a product manufacturer that wishes to donate your product for one or more unit or typology, and thus be highlighted in all future press and education about the project, you can contact us at the project email listed on the website. Likewise, if you'd like to sponsor one or the whole array of these innovations, feel free to contact us.
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ACCESSIBILITY PROGRESS NOTE

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The passing of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) was a watershed moment and has been critical to especially new buildings and infrastructure systems becoming more supportive to more levels and types of mobility. But the victory did seem to result in a waning of effort to keep making progress, especially with regard to considering other sorts of capability differences amongst our population. That said, in the last 10 or so years there have been many product innovations and a rekindling of the discussion about to move toward universal support of all humans, and even other living beings, in the design movement's discourse.
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Bathroom: Accessible Bath Tub

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The bathtub itself is a wheelchair-transfer walk-iIn tub with a fast fill Faucet, and massage jets. The orthopedic and quality of life benefits of this are clear. And like the pot-filler* in the kitchen space, flow-rate is irrelevant, in terms of water usage, because you'll put the same amount of water into the tub regardless of how fast it gets there. Getting it there faster will also save a small amount of energy because less heat will be lost before use.

The bathtub is set up like a peninsula extending into the bathroom instead of with its long side against a wall, as would be the typical way to place it. This is so that care-givers can access the tub from any of 3 sides, including the one where the sink is. The opposite side is the one with the door for transfer. Not only will this be much easier to get in and out for someone reliant on a wheelchair, but it will also enable a very easy transfer using the suspension system dolly**. There is also a floor drain on that side as well tied to the recirculating shower***.

Enabling this level of self care and care-giver ease is very rare, and therefore worth the additional financial cost. Most of us that are more mobile-able take for granted the luxury of being able to shower or take a bath, not only for convenience but the significant mental health benefits.

The fact that the water in this house will be unparalleled in terms of its purity also means that the steam generated in the bathroom will have far fewer contaminants, keeping the indoor air at a higher quality.

This approach is not only much safer – it’s also something that has long been out of reach for many people with mobility challenges. Bathing and showering can be too risky for them and their caregivers, largely because they only have consistent access to non-accessible bathrooms like the one shown in this image of Ron’s current setup. These are the types of facilities typically found in apartments that people with mobility impairments can afford when relying on state subsistence benefits. While programs do exist to support modifications even in rental units, landlords are often unwilling to allow them, or the small square footage and other architectural limitations make renovations cost-prohibitive.

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Planet Scale Landing Page Version

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Ramboland is a universal design and community health demonstration project and living laboratory. This site is it's digital twin. It is, and always will be in a state of becoming, like it's real-world twin. The twin's will be increasing integrated with each other and into educational programs, through onsite sensors, data streams, bioregional digital twins, human reporting, and mixed reality and large-language-model (AI) interfaces. Among many other things these will spread the word about the higher possibilities for our built environments to produce living and economic value, and support the health and wealth generation of our most neglected and abused communities. Please, join team Rambo... integrate it into your learning and teaching, donate, explore, contact us, partner, and post about it!
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Bathroom: Cool Toilet

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And then of course there is the elephant in the bathroom – the toilet. Although we will not be going with a $6,000 Japanese toilet, we will be selected one with excellent geometry for caregiver and user ease, as well as either a built-in or bolt-on bidet and tushy dryer, which are becoming readily and affordably available in the market, and a great help to everyone involved.

Flushes greywater

""Japenese"" toilet features like a bidet and dryer improve experience for both users and caregivers.

A custom designed pedal mechanism as a second option for flushing (which will simply pull down on the dual-flush flush-valve handle) improves hygiene when usable, by allowing hand contact with the fixture to be avoided. In some cases it will also improve accessibility when 1. a user has the ability to step on it but not otherwise operate a flush mechanism higher up, or 2. a user of a wheelchair can maneuver it to run over the pedal.

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Universal Design: 40" Doors

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36 inch wide doors, per the minimum requirements of ADA (link to reference), are what we call barely legal. They're just good enough, not great. Someone relying on a wheelchair can easily still lose some knuckle skin going through a 36" wide door if they're self-propelling. Because they are so common, standard doorways have an economy of scale (link to definition), and so they are cheaper than most other sizes. Despite this we felt it made sense to take a stand and specify 40" wide doors everywhere at Ramboland. Economies of scale only occur when something is legally standardized, or sells enough because of demand. Let's drive up demand for safer, better doors.

For much of the design process we have planned to provide an overhead track system to support a hanging mechanism that allows Ron, visitors, and/or future residents to be comfortably suspended, and moved easily around the house to key fixtures, appliances, furniture, etc., by a caregiver or their own control interface. Accommodating this structurally and architecturally was challenging and increasing complicatedness and cost. Getting it through doors, and to all those locations was particularly challenging. We recently expanded the track idea to go throughout the entire house however, rationalizing that the track itself was not the costly part, and it even being a somewhat fun "ride" for some fit well with the theme park implications of the project name. And yet it was still not universal in the access it granted and getting more over-the-top than might be reasonable even for this swing-for-the-fences project. And then it occurred to us that maybe we could hang the components that actually suspend our bodies from a floor-based mobile unit, something like an engine block lift. We thought this was very clever. In what couldn't even be considered an "ah ha" moment, but more like a "yeah duh" moment, we realized people make those already. Of course they do. They can fit through doors, turn and move along on casters, change height and orientation for different fixtures, furnishings, and appliances, and more. They can be operated by motor, or caregiver elbow grease.

That said, if we're not able to get the one we want, we may still modify an engine block lift! Which might actually be cooler and cheaper, and perhaps our partners who work and learn in fabrication and robotics labs might help us make that!
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Energy Delivery

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Kitchen: Height Adjustable Double Appliance

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As with our split cooktop (link to vignette) our design team, including our accessible equipment advisor, have come up with an approach to some of the appliances, which we think will increase accessibility for more folks. By placing two half-height appliances together –one above and one below a height adjustable counter section –, the full size microwave, and an oven can both become highly accessible while using up minimal space.
When the counter is raised a person using a wheelchair could also pull in under the oven, and likely reach both appliances, with really easy access to the oven. When the pair are lowered the whole way to a point at which the oven is on the floor, the microwave could be all the way down to under counter height, and easily accessed from the front, or by someone in a wheelchair who has pulled in beside it under the sink.

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Laundry - Washer/Dyer

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The washer/dryer unit is placed in the mechanical room for convenience, and shortens pipe length from treatment systems to all fixtures and appliances using treated rain for washing and irrigation. This will also slightly post/pre-heat return air before it is exhausted through an energy recovery ventilator (ERV) or cycled back into the house. This is also creating a warmer pocket of air on the northern wall, and is what's called "waste heat capture," which is good because Lancaster will remain a "heating load dominant" climate for at least the next couple of decades.
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Bathroom: The best shower in the tri-state area!

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"Recirculating shower saves 90% of energy and 85% of water compared to code. High-flow shower head for convenience and quality of life.

Many do not fully appreciate some of the luxuries and coping mechanisms we have in our society, nor realize that many don’t have safe or frequent access to them. For example, showers. In Ron’s current subsistence level living situation, it is unsafe for him to take a shower as well as it is unsafe for his caregivers to assist him during a shower. Because of that, he relies mostly on sponge bathing, as do millions of other people with limited mobility. The shower installed at Rambolandwill allow Ron (and ultimately other users) to have access to a full soaker tub with a door that allows a suspension system to carry him safely and conveniently in and out of it. The tub is positioned in such a way that caregivers can reach in from 3 of the 4 sides, a rare convenience. The bathroom will also feature a high-flow shower head next to the bathtub that he can enter independently in a wheelchair or with support of the suspension system and enjoy a better shower experience.

How does this comply with our other environmental goals? Well, the showering system we are installing is called a recirculating shower. Despite its high-flow rainforest shower head, it saves almost 90% of both water and energy compared to a code compliant 2.5 gallon per minute showerhead. This is because unlike standard showers that lose all the water and heat after it passes over our bodies and down the drain only once, water in this system will recirculate about 7 times before being drained. This is possible because the shower has built-in treatment, filtration, and temperature regulators, which also ensure cleaner water than typical tap water and allow for a perfectly controlled water temperature, making them safer in terms of burns and cold shocks – a greater risk with users that have speech challenges.

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EV Delivery Vehicle

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This is a great example of the wacky, creative contortions we find ourselves in when we audaciously step into extremely aggressive goals with a world-class team, working from regenerative thinking and integrative principles. Several of these ideas fly directly in the face of longstanding environmental movement dogma, so we invite you to not reject or accept these ideas before really considering them in terms of their effects, and what paradigms and assumptions you are sitting in as you do so.

Research (get from Noah Zallen at Introba) and projects are indicating that energy microgrids can achieve "islandable" status and produce a far smaller surplus of energy if they have massive and dynamic storage in the form of EV's that are consistently connected to them via two-way chargers. We have wanted to provide a wheelchair modified EV as part of this project all along. Now it may have even more purpose.

This insight from one of our energy engineers (Noah Zallen at Introba) triggered a set of unexpected addtional ideas with one of our civil engineers (Jim Remlin with Sherwood Design Engineers). What if we helped our YIMBY program that expanded the systems approaches to neighbors's yards could jump across streets using the EV. What if instead of direct piping from neighbors' roofs to our cisterns, we placed rain barrels at YIMBY houses on other blocks in this and other low-income neighborhoods? It could be calculated based on rainfall and roof collection areas when those barrels would be full. The EV could bring an empty barrel, and swap it for the full one, and take that water to one of our partner's sites, DECA City Farms probably, where additional food production was occurring and there may be additional water needs, or just a preference rain with some extra goodies in it plants will like, and no chlorine they won't like. Having dropped off several full rain barrels the EV van with a liftgate would be empty and able to haul crops from the other farm to either locations where canning, jarring, pickling, etc could occur, or directly to a sales point or a free distribution point like a food bank, church, park, or community center.

This torque-intensive, low-milage journey is a perfect fit for the strengths of EV's, and it would likely return to its charger at Ramboland with a lot of remaining battery charge, which if it the nanogrid decided it made sense for economic or energy resilience reasons, could power the house or charge its batteries or those batteries placed in neighboring houses to prevent refrigerated food loss or medical device power loss during a blackout.

Likewise, the EV's could actually deliver charged batteries from energy surplus producing sites, to energy deficit suffering YIMBY partners as well.

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Air Quality / Chemistry Monitoring and Treatment

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Air quality in western modernity has been a bit of a rollercoaster. Before the industrial revolution humanity had seldom (though certainly not never) produced a concentrated pollutant source consistently enough to create lasting outdoor or even indoor air quality threats or problems. Cities became incredibly polluted in the early and mid stages of industrialization, so much so that those that could live outside of them did so. Regulation and other factors that moved industry out of urban centers from urban poor, to rural poor areas, essentially diluted the contamination enough that it became somewhat less severe issues for broader areas. The Clean Air Act and its sibling Clean Water Act substantially reduced the negative impacts of industry, which had been radically disproportionately impacting poor and non-human living beings. Regulation and enforcement have continued to struggle to keep up with the propagation of new sorts of industries and their new contaminates, and other factors like corporate lobbying and politicians susceptible to it have hindered their effectiveness. But generally the arc of outdoor air quality over nearly the last century and half has been mostly a trend in the healthier direction, with ozone loss for a time, and throughout the century greenhouse gas emissions as indirect health impacts of air contamination steadily rising.

In the mid to late stages of industrialization our industries were producing new chemicals for household and other products at a rate well beyond what testing, medical and health analysis could keep pace with. Fashion trends in architecture and interior design at times exacerbated this, while health and green building rating systems at least pointed the way to often cost-effective avoidance of indoor health threats from products and materials, albeit without really moving the bell-curve of building industry practice all that much. It would be fair to say that have substantially impacted product and material manufacturing, leveraging the PR and marketing motives of building product manufacturers, though greenwashing still runs rampant. Much of these
efforts fall short of proper prioritization and accurate technical considerations however, and the air chemistry being brought to bear on Ramboland is rarified air, both literally and figuratively (sorry, couldn't resist).

By 1. maintaining a simple material palette, 2. maximizing material reuse, 3. being highly critical of chemical content in all products and materials selected, 4. resorting to new materials only when necessary and via local and scientifically validated and/or certified content, as well as 5. introducing filtration and other treatment within rooms and sometimes within HVAC systems (whichever is more effective in terms of air quality, and often also hard costs, and addressing other air quality issues like temperature and humidity as well) Ramboland will have amongst the most pristine air of any building. This 'optimization sequence' ensures maximum performance and minimal cost. Ongoing air quality testing will add insight and prompt responses to air quality impacts materials and products introduced by occupants (clothes, accessories, food, and other belongings) as well as activities like cooking, bathing, cleaning, and respirating, further strides will be made in controlling for and maintaining super healthy air quality beyond design and construction stages, in a way that can be accessed by education systems and the public at large.
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Bedroom: Convenience Vanity/Sink and Indoor Green Roof

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There is a convenience lavatory/sink in the bedroom as well – this is just that, convenience. Especially for care-givers convenience in having rapid access to a sink and faucet in the bedroom for drinking or cleanup needs. Like the kitchen sink and faucet, an additional control is included here to manage the low amounts of irrigation the indoor green roofs in both spaces will require – which will also assist in dust control on those horizontal out of reach areas, and the green roofs will help to moderate air contaminants, oxygen levels, and humidity levels, not to mention provide a biophilic (Insert definition link) psychological benefit.

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YIMBY - Energy Production

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Universal Design: Suspension System

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For much of the design process we have planned to provide an overhead track system to support a hanging mechanism that allows Ron, visitors, and/or future residents to be comfortably suspended, and moved easily around the house to key fixtures, appliances, furniture, etc., by a caregiver or their own control interface. Accommodating this structurally and architecturally was challenging and increasing complicatedness and cost. Getting it through doors, and to all those locations was particularly challenging. We recently expanded the track idea to go throughout the entire house however, rationalizing that the track itself was not the costly part, and it even being a somewhat fun ""ride"" for some fit well with the theme park implications of the project name. And yet it was still not universal in the access it granted and getting more over-the-top than might be reasonable even for this swing-for-the-fences project. And then it occurred to us that maybe we could hang the components that actually suspend our bodies from a floor-based mobile unit, something like an engine block lift. We thought this was very clever. In what couldn't even be considered an ""ah ha"" moment, but more like a ""yeah duh"" moment, we realized these make those already. Of course they do. They can fit through doors, turn and move along on casters, change height and orientation for different fixtures, furnishings, and appliances, and more. They can be operated by motor, or caregiver elbow grease.

That said, if we're not able to get the one we want, we may still modify an engine block lift! Which might actually be cooler and cheaper, and perhaps our partners who work and learn in fabrication and robotics labs might help us make that!
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Kitchen: Pull-down Upper Cabinets

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Storage can be a serious challenge in spaces with high levels of mobility accessibility. Limitations on what can be reached by various folks is not only limited, but often mutually exclusive. I.e. some folks can't reach things down low easily, others can't reach things up high, both for various reasons. Universal Design is an aspiration, a north star that perhaps can never truly be reached, but it can get us a lot of progress in checking ourselves against it, and repeatedly asking ""how can we make this better for more people?""

The kitchen at Ramboland is packed with examples of this, one of our favorites being the pull-down cabinets. There are several versions of this on the market; some allow you to pull the ""guts"" of the cabinet straight down out of the bottom of the cabinet carcass (that's what they call the outer enclosure of cabinets), so that the bottommost shelf in an upper cabinet can be the whole down at counter height, or perhaps even lower if the counter itself can also drop. Others allow those guts to both come down and forward. Still others bring the entire carcass and its guts the whole way down and to the front edge of the counter.

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Kitchen: Low Refrigeration and Dishwasher

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Nothing super innovative here, honestly. Tried and true, energy star certified under-counter freezer (left) and refrigerator (right) and dishwasher (further right, beside sink because it uses water) with a wheelchair pull-in between/beside all of them. The prep space between the two refrigeration units is set at desk height, though may be adjustable. We're leaving the space above the counter on top of the refrigerator open in case an additional refrigerator is desired, or for coffee/espresso machines, toasters, air fryer, or other small appliances.

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Kitchen: Height Adjustable Mobile Island

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The split, height adjustable, and mobile island maximizes use of space, surface activity utilization and accessibility. In order to maximize human mobility in the space we have used up a lot of extra square footage for clearance for wheelchairs, etc. This is a bit at odds with our intentions around material and energy use efficiency, because the greater space requires a larger envelope, and that also yields a greater volume of air. Together these increase both the embodied energy and energy use
during its occupancy and useful life, to run mechanical systems to supplement our passive designs, to keep the air comfortable and healthy. So, we had some making up to do by optimizing space. We sought to make both of the main rooms in the house as multi-purposeful as possible.

This one piece of furniture will allow the room to function as a large kitchen, a generous dining room, a spacious living room, a social space, and often any desired combination of these. Not only is this much more convenient and "universal." but it also helps offset the extra square footage and clearances included for mobility improvements.
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Kitchen: Custom split 4 burner induction cooktop.

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For those that have never had to worry about lateral mobility once they learned to walk, it may not be obvious why you would split a cooking range in half to put a prep space in the middle of it. Sliding back and forth laterally in a typical wheelchair is hard enough, let alone while handling sharp knives and hot pots, pans, and foods. If chefs and home cooks alike who rely on wheelchairs and can use their hands effectively can do all their prep in one position and move pots, pans, and foods on and off of induction burners without having to reach down and grab their wheels or electric chair controls to reposition over and over again, it could take a lot of the difficulty out of cooking.

Induction technology makes this easier than ever before, not to mention they are safer because the surface is not heated directly, and usually safe to the touch even immediately after or even during cooking. Most units also allow you to set an exact temperature. This is a big part of why, although some debate wages on, many of the world's most respected chefs and cooks feel that induction cooktops are the best way to go, even better than natural gas burners that introduce contaminants to the breathing zone along with the methane, which we're* finding leaks not only in our homes whether the appliances are in use or not, but throughout our cities from the gas lines. This introduces significant explosion and air quality risks, in addition to the negative environmental impacts on par or beyond any other fossil fuel**.

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Hot water system

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Recent innovations in hot water heaters have led not only to a more widely available energy efficient option than typical gas fired or even old electric water heater technology. But hot water heat pumps have also introduced a new source of cool air. As these units produce hot water buy pulling energy out of the air, they expel cooled air. In the winter this can be a bit of problem, because you’re effectively placing a small air conditioner, usually in your basement, during months you’re already spending too much energy on heating. We will exhaust this cooled air to the outside of the building in these months. But precooling the air in our mechanical room in the warmer months is a benefit.

Coupled with a few hot water solar panels on the roof, not only will we be able to produce all the hot water we need using very little energy, but we are also investigating a warmwater, subsurface irrigation system to supplement heating in the greenhouse and even extend growing seasons in outdoors raised beds. One of the many living-lab experiments we’ll be doing early on.
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YIMBY - Energy Sharing / Resilience

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Super-High Efficiency Heating/Cooling System

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Having already designed a building envelope that allows wind and sun to do more of the cooling and heating when its needed most, and as little as possible when its not wanted, the remaining heating and cooling loads (link to definition) are quite small. This “downsizing” or “right-sizing” (link to definition) allows significant cost savings, and depending on how a project decides to think about it, it could be considered to create an allowance that can be spent to get more expensive technologies - which could still cost less than typical because they’re so much smaller.
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Counter-intuitive / Outside the Box Thinking

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This is a great example of the outside-the-box, creative contortions we find ourselves in when we audaciously step into extremely aggressive goals with a world-class team, working from regenerative thinking and integrative principles. Several of these ideas fly directly in the face of longstanding environmental movement dogma, so we invite you to not reject or accept these ideas before really considering them in their context and in terms of their effects, and what paradigms and assumptions you are sitting in as you do so.
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Kitchen: Height Adjustable Sink

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The height adjustable sink, which uses flex hose to allow fixture movement, provides a wheelchair pull-in space beside the adjacent appliances regardless of which height those are set at, and of course access to the sink itself.

The sink will also have an additional metered faucet control. Metered faucets are those activated usually by pushing down a knob and which then run for a specific amount of time. The button or knob slowly pops up stopping water flow when it has returned to its deactivated original position. This metered control will not control a faucet that pours into this sink however. This is a manual backup for the
irrigation system for the indoor green roof (link to vignette) just beyond the top of the kitchen wall, which caps the mechanical room behind it. The primary faucet will be a sensor activated basic kitchen faucet. We will likely also provide a typical sprayer that can also be held and activated by a button on the sprayer head.

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AUTOMATION NOTE

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With the help of our accessibility automation and IOT advisor**** we will be tech-enabling as much of this as off-the-shelf AI assistants and IOT allows, but with manual operation overrides/alternatives whenever possible as well, for the sake user preferences and
instances of system failure (power or connective loss).
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PRODUCT DONATION NOTE

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Unless we get these systems donated for all needs, our plan is to demonstrate and test a variety each one of these features, and highlight them over time, sharing our findings in blogs, social media posts, and in our educational materials with local and worldwide education partners.
If you're a product manufacturer that wishes to donate your product for one or more unit or typology, and thus be highlighted in all future press and education about the project, you can contact us at the project email listed on the website. Likewise, if you'd like to sponsor one or the whole array of these innovations, feel free to contact us.
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ACCESSIBILITY PROGRESS NOTE

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The passing of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) was a watershed moment and has been critical to especially new buildings and infrastructure systems becoming more supportive to more levels and types of mobility. But the victory did seem to result in a waning of effort to keep making progress, especially with regard to considering other sorts of capability differences amongst our population. That said, in the last 10 or so years there have been many product innovations and a rekindling of the discussion about to move toward universal support of all humans, and even other living beings, in the design movement's discourse.
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Bathroom: Accessible Bath Tub

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The bathtub itself is a wheelchair-transfer walk-iIn tub with a fast fill Faucet, and massage jets. The orthopedic and quality of life benefits of this are clear. And like the pot-filler* in the kitchen space, flow-rate is irrelevant, in terms of water usage, because you'll put the same amount of water into the tub regardless of how fast it gets there. Getting it there faster will also save a small amount of energy because less heat will be lost before use.

The bathtub is set up like a peninsula extending into the bathroom instead of with its long side against a wall, as would be the typical way to place it. This is so that care-givers can access the tub from any of 3 sides, including the one where the sink is. The opposite side is the one with the door for transfer. Not only will this be much easier to get in and out for someone reliant on a wheelchair, but it will also enable a very easy transfer using the suspension system dolly**. There is also a floor drain on that side as well tied to the recirculating shower***.

Enabling this level of self care and care-giver ease is very rare, and therefore worth the additional financial cost. Most of us that are more mobile-able take for granted the luxury of being able to shower or take a bath, not only for convenience but the significant mental health benefits.

The fact that the water in this house will be unparalleled in terms of its purity also means that the steam generated in the bathroom will have far fewer contaminants, keeping the indoor air at a higher quality.

This approach is not only much safer – it’s also something that has long been out of reach for many people with mobility challenges. Bathing and showering can be too risky for them and their caregivers, largely because they only have consistent access to non-accessible bathrooms like the one shown in this image of Ron’s current setup. These are the types of facilities typically found in apartments that people with mobility impairments can afford when relying on state subsistence benefits. While programs do exist to support modifications even in rental units, landlords are often unwilling to allow them, or the small square footage and other architectural limitations make renovations cost-prohibitive.

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Planet Scale Landing Page Version

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Ramboland is a universal design and community health demonstration project and living laboratory. This site is it's digital twin. It is, and always will be in a state of becoming, like it's real-world twin. The twin's will be increasing integrated with each other and into educational programs, through onsite sensors, data streams, bioregional digital twins, human reporting, and mixed reality and large-language-model (AI) interfaces. Among many other things these will spread the word about the higher possibilities for our built environments to produce living and economic value, and support the health and wealth generation of our most neglected and abused communities. Please, join team Rambo... integrate it into your learning and teaching, donate, explore, contact us, partner, and post about it!
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Bathroom: Cool Toilet

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And then of course there is the elephant in the bathroom – the toilet. Although we will not be going with a $6,000 Japanese toilet, we will be selected one with excellent geometry for caregiver and user ease, as well as either a built-in or bolt-on bidet and tushy dryer, which are becoming readily and affordably available in the market, and a great help to everyone involved.

Flushes greywater

""Japenese"" toilet features like a bidet and dryer improve experience for both users and caregivers.

A custom designed pedal mechanism as a second option for flushing (which will simply pull down on the dual-flush flush-valve handle) improves hygiene when usable, by allowing hand contact with the fixture to be avoided. In some cases it will also improve accessibility when 1. a user has the ability to step on it but not otherwise operate a flush mechanism higher up, or 2. a user of a wheelchair can maneuver it to run over the pedal.

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Universal Design: 40" Doors

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36 inch wide doors, per the minimum requirements of ADA (link to reference), are what we call barely legal. They're just good enough, not great. Someone relying on a wheelchair can easily still lose some knuckle skin going through a 36" wide door if they're self-propelling. Because they are so common, standard doorways have an economy of scale (link to definition), and so they are cheaper than most other sizes. Despite this we felt it made sense to take a stand and specify 40" wide doors everywhere at Ramboland. Economies of scale only occur when something is legally standardized, or sells enough because of demand. Let's drive up demand for safer, better doors.

For much of the design process we have planned to provide an overhead track system to support a hanging mechanism that allows Ron, visitors, and/or future residents to be comfortably suspended, and moved easily around the house to key fixtures, appliances, furniture, etc., by a caregiver or their own control interface. Accommodating this structurally and architecturally was challenging and increasing complicatedness and cost. Getting it through doors, and to all those locations was particularly challenging. We recently expanded the track idea to go throughout the entire house however, rationalizing that the track itself was not the costly part, and it even being a somewhat fun "ride" for some fit well with the theme park implications of the project name. And yet it was still not universal in the access it granted and getting more over-the-top than might be reasonable even for this swing-for-the-fences project. And then it occurred to us that maybe we could hang the components that actually suspend our bodies from a floor-based mobile unit, something like an engine block lift. We thought this was very clever. In what couldn't even be considered an "ah ha" moment, but more like a "yeah duh" moment, we realized people make those already. Of course they do. They can fit through doors, turn and move along on casters, change height and orientation for different fixtures, furnishings, and appliances, and more. They can be operated by motor, or caregiver elbow grease.

That said, if we're not able to get the one we want, we may still modify an engine block lift! Which might actually be cooler and cheaper, and perhaps our partners who work and learn in fabrication and robotics labs might help us make that!
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Energy Delivery

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Kitchen: Height Adjustable Double Appliance

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As with our split cooktop (link to vignette) our design team, including our accessible equipment advisor, have come up with an approach to some of the appliances, which we think will increase accessibility for more folks. By placing two half-height appliances together –one above and one below a height adjustable counter section –, the full size microwave, and an oven can both become highly accessible while using up minimal space.
When the counter is raised a person using a wheelchair could also pull in under the oven, and likely reach both appliances, with really easy access to the oven. When the pair are lowered the whole way to a point at which the oven is on the floor, the microwave could be all the way down to under counter height, and easily accessed from the front, or by someone in a wheelchair who has pulled in beside it under the sink.

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Laundry - Washer/Dyer

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The washer/dryer unit is placed in the mechanical room for convenience, and shortens pipe length from treatment systems to all fixtures and appliances using treated rain for washing and irrigation. This will also slightly post/pre-heat return air before it is exhausted through an energy recovery ventilator (ERV) or cycled back into the house. This is also creating a warmer pocket of air on the northern wall, and is what's called "waste heat capture," which is good because Lancaster will remain a "heating load dominant" climate for at least the next couple of decades.
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Bathroom: The best shower in the tri-state area!

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"Recirculating shower saves 90% of energy and 85% of water compared to code. High-flow shower head for convenience and quality of life.

Many do not fully appreciate some of the luxuries and coping mechanisms we have in our society, nor realize that many don’t have safe or frequent access to them. For example, showers. In Ron’s current subsistence level living situation, it is unsafe for him to take a shower as well as it is unsafe for his caregivers to assist him during a shower. Because of that, he relies mostly on sponge bathing, as do millions of other people with limited mobility. The shower installed at Rambolandwill allow Ron (and ultimately other users) to have access to a full soaker tub with a door that allows a suspension system to carry him safely and conveniently in and out of it. The tub is positioned in such a way that caregivers can reach in from 3 of the 4 sides, a rare convenience. The bathroom will also feature a high-flow shower head next to the bathtub that he can enter independently in a wheelchair or with support of the suspension system and enjoy a better shower experience.

How does this comply with our other environmental goals? Well, the showering system we are installing is called a recirculating shower. Despite its high-flow rainforest shower head, it saves almost 90% of both water and energy compared to a code compliant 2.5 gallon per minute showerhead. This is because unlike standard showers that lose all the water and heat after it passes over our bodies and down the drain only once, water in this system will recirculate about 7 times before being drained. This is possible because the shower has built-in treatment, filtration, and temperature regulators, which also ensure cleaner water than typical tap water and allow for a perfectly controlled water temperature, making them safer in terms of burns and cold shocks – a greater risk with users that have speech challenges.

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EV Delivery Vehicle

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This is a great example of the wacky, creative contortions we find ourselves in when we audaciously step into extremely aggressive goals with a world-class team, working from regenerative thinking and integrative principles. Several of these ideas fly directly in the face of longstanding environmental movement dogma, so we invite you to not reject or accept these ideas before really considering them in terms of their effects, and what paradigms and assumptions you are sitting in as you do so.

Research (get from Noah Zallen at Introba) and projects are indicating that energy microgrids can achieve "islandable" status and produce a far smaller surplus of energy if they have massive and dynamic storage in the form of EV's that are consistently connected to them via two-way chargers. We have wanted to provide a wheelchair modified EV as part of this project all along. Now it may have even more purpose.

This insight from one of our energy engineers (Noah Zallen at Introba) triggered a set of unexpected addtional ideas with one of our civil engineers (Jim Remlin with Sherwood Design Engineers). What if we helped our YIMBY program that expanded the systems approaches to neighbors's yards could jump across streets using the EV. What if instead of direct piping from neighbors' roofs to our cisterns, we placed rain barrels at YIMBY houses on other blocks in this and other low-income neighborhoods? It could be calculated based on rainfall and roof collection areas when those barrels would be full. The EV could bring an empty barrel, and swap it for the full one, and take that water to one of our partner's sites, DECA City Farms probably, where additional food production was occurring and there may be additional water needs, or just a preference rain with some extra goodies in it plants will like, and no chlorine they won't like. Having dropped off several full rain barrels the EV van with a liftgate would be empty and able to haul crops from the other farm to either locations where canning, jarring, pickling, etc could occur, or directly to a sales point or a free distribution point like a food bank, church, park, or community center.

This torque-intensive, low-milage journey is a perfect fit for the strengths of EV's, and it would likely return to its charger at Ramboland with a lot of remaining battery charge, which if it the nanogrid decided it made sense for economic or energy resilience reasons, could power the house or charge its batteries or those batteries placed in neighboring houses to prevent refrigerated food loss or medical device power loss during a blackout.

Likewise, the EV's could actually deliver charged batteries from energy surplus producing sites, to energy deficit suffering YIMBY partners as well.

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Air Quality / Chemistry Monitoring and Treatment

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Air quality in western modernity has been a bit of a rollercoaster. Before the industrial revolution humanity had seldom (though certainly not never) produced a concentrated pollutant source consistently enough to create lasting outdoor or even indoor air quality threats or problems. Cities became incredibly polluted in the early and mid stages of industrialization, so much so that those that could live outside of them did so. Regulation and other factors that moved industry out of urban centers from urban poor, to rural poor areas, essentially diluted the contamination enough that it became somewhat less severe issues for broader areas. The Clean Air Act and its sibling Clean Water Act substantially reduced the negative impacts of industry, which had been radically disproportionately impacting poor and non-human living beings. Regulation and enforcement have continued to struggle to keep up with the propagation of new sorts of industries and their new contaminates, and other factors like corporate lobbying and politicians susceptible to it have hindered their effectiveness. But generally the arc of outdoor air quality over nearly the last century and half has been mostly a trend in the healthier direction, with ozone loss for a time, and throughout the century greenhouse gas emissions as indirect health impacts of air contamination steadily rising.

In the mid to late stages of industrialization our industries were producing new chemicals for household and other products at a rate well beyond what testing, medical and health analysis could keep pace with. Fashion trends in architecture and interior design at times exacerbated this, while health and green building rating systems at least pointed the way to often cost-effective avoidance of indoor health threats from products and materials, albeit without really moving the bell-curve of building industry practice all that much. It would be fair to say that have substantially impacted product and material manufacturing, leveraging the PR and marketing motives of building product manufacturers, though greenwashing still runs rampant. Much of these
efforts fall short of proper prioritization and accurate technical considerations however, and the air chemistry being brought to bear on Ramboland is rarified air, both literally and figuratively (sorry, couldn't resist).

By 1. maintaining a simple material palette, 2. maximizing material reuse, 3. being highly critical of chemical content in all products and materials selected, 4. resorting to new materials only when necessary and via local and scientifically validated and/or certified content, as well as 5. introducing filtration and other treatment within rooms and sometimes within HVAC systems (whichever is more effective in terms of air quality, and often also hard costs, and addressing other air quality issues like temperature and humidity as well) Ramboland will have amongst the most pristine air of any building. This 'optimization sequence' ensures maximum performance and minimal cost. Ongoing air quality testing will add insight and prompt responses to air quality impacts materials and products introduced by occupants (clothes, accessories, food, and other belongings) as well as activities like cooking, bathing, cleaning, and respirating, further strides will be made in controlling for and maintaining super healthy air quality beyond design and construction stages, in a way that can be accessed by education systems and the public at large.
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Bedroom: Convenience Vanity/Sink and Indoor Green Roof

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There is a convenience lavatory/sink in the bedroom as well – this is just that, convenience. Especially for care-givers convenience in having rapid access to a sink and faucet in the bedroom for drinking or cleanup needs. Like the kitchen sink and faucet, an additional control is included here to manage the low amounts of irrigation the indoor green roofs in both spaces will require – which will also assist in dust control on those horizontal out of reach areas, and the green roofs will help to moderate air contaminants, oxygen levels, and humidity levels, not to mention provide a biophilic (Insert definition link) psychological benefit.

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YIMBY - Energy Production

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Universal Design: Suspension System

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For much of the design process we have planned to provide an overhead track system to support a hanging mechanism that allows Ron, visitors, and/or future residents to be comfortably suspended, and moved easily around the house to key fixtures, appliances, furniture, etc., by a caregiver or their own control interface. Accommodating this structurally and architecturally was challenging and increasing complicatedness and cost. Getting it through doors, and to all those locations was particularly challenging. We recently expanded the track idea to go throughout the entire house however, rationalizing that the track itself was not the costly part, and it even being a somewhat fun ""ride"" for some fit well with the theme park implications of the project name. And yet it was still not universal in the access it granted and getting more over-the-top than might be reasonable even for this swing-for-the-fences project. And then it occurred to us that maybe we could hang the components that actually suspend our bodies from a floor-based mobile unit, something like an engine block lift. We thought this was very clever. In what couldn't even be considered an ""ah ha"" moment, but more like a ""yeah duh"" moment, we realized these make those already. Of course they do. They can fit through doors, turn and move along on casters, change height and orientation for different fixtures, furnishings, and appliances, and more. They can be operated by motor, or caregiver elbow grease.

That said, if we're not able to get the one we want, we may still modify an engine block lift! Which might actually be cooler and cheaper, and perhaps our partners who work and learn in fabrication and robotics labs might help us make that!
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Kitchen: Pull-down Upper Cabinets

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Storage can be a serious challenge in spaces with high levels of mobility accessibility. Limitations on what can be reached by various folks is not only limited, but often mutually exclusive. I.e. some folks can't reach things down low easily, others can't reach things up high, both for various reasons. Universal Design is an aspiration, a north star that perhaps can never truly be reached, but it can get us a lot of progress in checking ourselves against it, and repeatedly asking ""how can we make this better for more people?""

The kitchen at Ramboland is packed with examples of this, one of our favorites being the pull-down cabinets. There are several versions of this on the market; some allow you to pull the ""guts"" of the cabinet straight down out of the bottom of the cabinet carcass (that's what they call the outer enclosure of cabinets), so that the bottommost shelf in an upper cabinet can be the whole down at counter height, or perhaps even lower if the counter itself can also drop. Others allow those guts to both come down and forward. Still others bring the entire carcass and its guts the whole way down and to the front edge of the counter.

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Kitchen: Low Refrigeration and Dishwasher

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Nothing super innovative here, honestly. Tried and true, energy star certified under-counter freezer (left) and refrigerator (right) and dishwasher (further right, beside sink because it uses water) with a wheelchair pull-in between/beside all of them. The prep space between the two refrigeration units is set at desk height, though may be adjustable. We're leaving the space above the counter on top of the refrigerator open in case an additional refrigerator is desired, or for coffee/espresso machines, toasters, air fryer, or other small appliances.

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Kitchen: Height Adjustable Mobile Island

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The split, height adjustable, and mobile island maximizes use of space, surface activity utilization and accessibility. In order to maximize human mobility in the space we have used up a lot of extra square footage for clearance for wheelchairs, etc. This is a bit at odds with our intentions around material and energy use efficiency, because the greater space requires a larger envelope, and that also yields a greater volume of air. Together these increase both the embodied energy and energy use
during its occupancy and useful life, to run mechanical systems to supplement our passive designs, to keep the air comfortable and healthy. So, we had some making up to do by optimizing space. We sought to make both of the main rooms in the house as multi-purposeful as possible.

This one piece of furniture will allow the room to function as a large kitchen, a generous dining room, a spacious living room, a social space, and often any desired combination of these. Not only is this much more convenient and "universal." but it also helps offset the extra square footage and clearances included for mobility improvements.
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Kitchen: Custom split 4 burner induction cooktop.

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For those that have never had to worry about lateral mobility once they learned to walk, it may not be obvious why you would split a cooking range in half to put a prep space in the middle of it. Sliding back and forth laterally in a typical wheelchair is hard enough, let alone while handling sharp knives and hot pots, pans, and foods. If chefs and home cooks alike who rely on wheelchairs and can use their hands effectively can do all their prep in one position and move pots, pans, and foods on and off of induction burners without having to reach down and grab their wheels or electric chair controls to reposition over and over again, it could take a lot of the difficulty out of cooking.

Induction technology makes this easier than ever before, not to mention they are safer because the surface is not heated directly, and usually safe to the touch even immediately after or even during cooking. Most units also allow you to set an exact temperature. This is a big part of why, although some debate wages on, many of the world's most respected chefs and cooks feel that induction cooktops are the best way to go, even better than natural gas burners that introduce contaminants to the breathing zone along with the methane, which we're* finding leaks not only in our homes whether the appliances are in use or not, but throughout our cities from the gas lines. This introduces significant explosion and air quality risks, in addition to the negative environmental impacts on par or beyond any other fossil fuel**.

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Hot water system

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Recent innovations in hot water heaters have led not only to a more widely available energy efficient option than typical gas fired or even old electric water heater technology. But hot water heat pumps have also introduced a new source of cool air. As these units produce hot water buy pulling energy out of the air, they expel cooled air. In the winter this can be a bit of problem, because you’re effectively placing a small air conditioner, usually in your basement, during months you’re already spending too much energy on heating. We will exhaust this cooled air to the outside of the building in these months. But precooling the air in our mechanical room in the warmer months is a benefit.

Coupled with a few hot water solar panels on the roof, not only will we be able to produce all the hot water we need using very little energy, but we are also investigating a warmwater, subsurface irrigation system to supplement heating in the greenhouse and even extend growing seasons in outdoors raised beds. One of the many living-lab experiments we’ll be doing early on.
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YIMBY - Energy Sharing / Resilience

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Super-High Efficiency Heating/Cooling System

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Having already designed a building envelope that allows wind and sun to do more of the cooling and heating when its needed most, and as little as possible when its not wanted, the remaining heating and cooling loads (link to definition) are quite small. This “downsizing” or “right-sizing” (link to definition) allows significant cost savings, and depending on how a project decides to think about it, it could be considered to create an allowance that can be spent to get more expensive technologies - which could still cost less than typical because they’re so much smaller.
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Counter-intuitive / Outside the Box Thinking

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This is a great example of the outside-the-box, creative contortions we find ourselves in when we audaciously step into extremely aggressive goals with a world-class team, working from regenerative thinking and integrative principles. Several of these ideas fly directly in the face of longstanding environmental movement dogma, so we invite you to not reject or accept these ideas before really considering them in their context and in terms of their effects, and what paradigms and assumptions you are sitting in as you do so.
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Kitchen: Height Adjustable Sink

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The height adjustable sink, which uses flex hose to allow fixture movement, provides a wheelchair pull-in space beside the adjacent appliances regardless of which height those are set at, and of course access to the sink itself.

The sink will also have an additional metered faucet control. Metered faucets are those activated usually by pushing down a knob and which then run for a specific amount of time. The button or knob slowly pops up stopping water flow when it has returned to its deactivated original position. This metered control will not control a faucet that pours into this sink however. This is a manual backup for the
irrigation system for the indoor green roof (link to vignette) just beyond the top of the kitchen wall, which caps the mechanical room behind it. The primary faucet will be a sensor activated basic kitchen faucet. We will likely also provide a typical sprayer that can also be held and activated by a button on the sprayer head.

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AUTOMATION NOTE

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With the help of our accessibility automation and IOT advisor**** we will be tech-enabling as much of this as off-the-shelf AI assistants and IOT allows, but with manual operation overrides/alternatives whenever possible as well, for the sake user preferences and
instances of system failure (power or connective loss).
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PRODUCT DONATION NOTE

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Unless we get these systems donated for all needs, our plan is to demonstrate and test a variety each one of these features, and highlight them over time, sharing our findings in blogs, social media posts, and in our educational materials with local and worldwide education partners.
If you're a product manufacturer that wishes to donate your product for one or more unit or typology, and thus be highlighted in all future press and education about the project, you can contact us at the project email listed on the website. Likewise, if you'd like to sponsor one or the whole array of these innovations, feel free to contact us.
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ACCESSIBILITY PROGRESS NOTE

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The passing of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) was a watershed moment and has been critical to especially new buildings and infrastructure systems becoming more supportive to more levels and types of mobility. But the victory did seem to result in a waning of effort to keep making progress, especially with regard to considering other sorts of capability differences amongst our population. That said, in the last 10 or so years there have been many product innovations and a rekindling of the discussion about to move toward universal support of all humans, and even other living beings, in the design movement's discourse.
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Bathroom: Accessible Bath Tub

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The bathtub itself is a wheelchair-transfer walk-iIn tub with a fast fill Faucet, and massage jets. The orthopedic and quality of life benefits of this are clear. And like the pot-filler* in the kitchen space, flow-rate is irrelevant, in terms of water usage, because you'll put the same amount of water into the tub regardless of how fast it gets there. Getting it there faster will also save a small amount of energy because less heat will be lost before use.

The bathtub is set up like a peninsula extending into the bathroom instead of with its long side against a wall, as would be the typical way to place it. This is so that care-givers can access the tub from any of 3 sides, including the one where the sink is. The opposite side is the one with the door for transfer. Not only will this be much easier to get in and out for someone reliant on a wheelchair, but it will also enable a very easy transfer using the suspension system dolly**. There is also a floor drain on that side as well tied to the recirculating shower***.

Enabling this level of self care and care-giver ease is very rare, and therefore worth the additional financial cost. Most of us that are more mobile-able take for granted the luxury of being able to shower or take a bath, not only for convenience but the significant mental health benefits.

The fact that the water in this house will be unparalleled in terms of its purity also means that the steam generated in the bathroom will have far fewer contaminants, keeping the indoor air at a higher quality.

This approach is not only much safer – it’s also something that has long been out of reach for many people with mobility challenges. Bathing and showering can be too risky for them and their caregivers, largely because they only have consistent access to non-accessible bathrooms like the one shown in this image of Ron’s current setup. These are the types of facilities typically found in apartments that people with mobility impairments can afford when relying on state subsistence benefits. While programs do exist to support modifications even in rental units, landlords are often unwilling to allow them, or the small square footage and other architectural limitations make renovations cost-prohibitive.

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Planet Scale Landing Page Version

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Ramboland is a universal design and community health demonstration project and living laboratory. This site is it's digital twin. It is, and always will be in a state of becoming, like it's real-world twin. The twin's will be increasing integrated with each other and into educational programs, through onsite sensors, data streams, bioregional digital twins, human reporting, and mixed reality and large-language-model (AI) interfaces. Among many other things these will spread the word about the higher possibilities for our built environments to produce living and economic value, and support the health and wealth generation of our most neglected and abused communities. Please, join team Rambo... integrate it into your learning and teaching, donate, explore, contact us, partner, and post about it!
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Laundry - Washer/Dyer

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The washer/dryer unit is placed in the mechanical room for convenience, and shortens pipe length from treatment systems to all fixtures and appliances using treated rain for washing and irrigation. This will also slightly post/pre-heat return air before it is exhausted through an energy recovery ventilator (ERV) or cycled back into the house. This is also creating a warmer pocket of air on the northern wall, and is what's called "waste heat capture," which is good because Lancaster will remain a "heating load dominant" climate for at least the next couple of decades.
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Energy Delivery

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Kitchen: Height Adjustable Double Appliance

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As with our split cooktop (link to vignette) our design team, including our accessible equipment advisor, have come up with an approach to some of the appliances, which we think will increase accessibility for more folks. By placing two half-height appliances together –one above and one below a height adjustable counter section –, the full size microwave, and an oven can both become highly accessible while using up minimal space.
When the counter is raised a person using a wheelchair could also pull in under the oven, and likely reach both appliances, with really easy access to the oven. When the pair are lowered the whole way to a point at which the oven is on the floor, the microwave could be all the way down to under counter height, and easily accessed from the front, or by someone in a wheelchair who has pulled in beside it under the sink.

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Bathroom: Cool Toilet

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And then of course there is the elephant in the bathroom – the toilet. Although we will not be going with a $6,000 Japanese toilet, we will be selected one with excellent geometry for caregiver and user ease, as well as either a built-in or bolt-on bidet and tushy dryer, which are becoming readily and affordably available in the market, and a great help to everyone involved.

Flushes greywater

""Japenese"" toilet features like a bidet and dryer improve experience for both users and caregivers.

A custom designed pedal mechanism as a second option for flushing (which will simply pull down on the dual-flush flush-valve handle) improves hygiene when usable, by allowing hand contact with the fixture to be avoided. In some cases it will also improve accessibility when 1. a user has the ability to step on it but not otherwise operate a flush mechanism higher up, or 2. a user of a wheelchair can maneuver it to run over the pedal.

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Universal Design: 40" Doors

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36 inch wide doors, per the minimum requirements of ADA (link to reference), are what we call barely legal. They're just good enough, not great. Someone relying on a wheelchair can easily still lose some knuckle skin going through a 36" wide door if they're self-propelling. Because they are so common, standard doorways have an economy of scale (link to definition), and so they are cheaper than most other sizes. Despite this we felt it made sense to take a stand and specify 40" wide doors everywhere at Ramboland. Economies of scale only occur when something is legally standardized, or sells enough because of demand. Let's drive up demand for safer, better doors.

For much of the design process we have planned to provide an overhead track system to support a hanging mechanism that allows Ron, visitors, and/or future residents to be comfortably suspended, and moved easily around the house to key fixtures, appliances, furniture, etc., by a caregiver or their own control interface. Accommodating this structurally and architecturally was challenging and increasing complicatedness and cost. Getting it through doors, and to all those locations was particularly challenging. We recently expanded the track idea to go throughout the entire house however, rationalizing that the track itself was not the costly part, and it even being a somewhat fun "ride" for some fit well with the theme park implications of the project name. And yet it was still not universal in the access it granted and getting more over-the-top than might be reasonable even for this swing-for-the-fences project. And then it occurred to us that maybe we could hang the components that actually suspend our bodies from a floor-based mobile unit, something like an engine block lift. We thought this was very clever. In what couldn't even be considered an "ah ha" moment, but more like a "yeah duh" moment, we realized people make those already. Of course they do. They can fit through doors, turn and move along on casters, change height and orientation for different fixtures, furnishings, and appliances, and more. They can be operated by motor, or caregiver elbow grease.

That said, if we're not able to get the one we want, we may still modify an engine block lift! Which might actually be cooler and cheaper, and perhaps our partners who work and learn in fabrication and robotics labs might help us make that!
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Bathroom: The best shower in the tri-state area!

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"Recirculating shower saves 90% of energy and 85% of water compared to code. High-flow shower head for convenience and quality of life.

Many do not fully appreciate some of the luxuries and coping mechanisms we have in our society, nor realize that many don’t have safe or frequent access to them. For example, showers. In Ron’s current subsistence level living situation, it is unsafe for him to take a shower as well as it is unsafe for his caregivers to assist him during a shower. Because of that, he relies mostly on sponge bathing, as do millions of other people with limited mobility. The shower installed at Rambolandwill allow Ron (and ultimately other users) to have access to a full soaker tub with a door that allows a suspension system to carry him safely and conveniently in and out of it. The tub is positioned in such a way that caregivers can reach in from 3 of the 4 sides, a rare convenience. The bathroom will also feature a high-flow shower head next to the bathtub that he can enter independently in a wheelchair or with support of the suspension system and enjoy a better shower experience.

How does this comply with our other environmental goals? Well, the showering system we are installing is called a recirculating shower. Despite its high-flow rainforest shower head, it saves almost 90% of both water and energy compared to a code compliant 2.5 gallon per minute showerhead. This is because unlike standard showers that lose all the water and heat after it passes over our bodies and down the drain only once, water in this system will recirculate about 7 times before being drained. This is possible because the shower has built-in treatment, filtration, and temperature regulators, which also ensure cleaner water than typical tap water and allow for a perfectly controlled water temperature, making them safer in terms of burns and cold shocks – a greater risk with users that have speech challenges.

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EV Delivery Vehicle

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This is a great example of the wacky, creative contortions we find ourselves in when we audaciously step into extremely aggressive goals with a world-class team, working from regenerative thinking and integrative principles. Several of these ideas fly directly in the face of longstanding environmental movement dogma, so we invite you to not reject or accept these ideas before really considering them in terms of their effects, and what paradigms and assumptions you are sitting in as you do so.

Research (get from Noah Zallen at Introba) and projects are indicating that energy microgrids can achieve "islandable" status and produce a far smaller surplus of energy if they have massive and dynamic storage in the form of EV's that are consistently connected to them via two-way chargers. We have wanted to provide a wheelchair modified EV as part of this project all along. Now it may have even more purpose.

This insight from one of our energy engineers (Noah Zallen at Introba) triggered a set of unexpected addtional ideas with one of our civil engineers (Jim Remlin with Sherwood Design Engineers). What if we helped our YIMBY program that expanded the systems approaches to neighbors's yards could jump across streets using the EV. What if instead of direct piping from neighbors' roofs to our cisterns, we placed rain barrels at YIMBY houses on other blocks in this and other low-income neighborhoods? It could be calculated based on rainfall and roof collection areas when those barrels would be full. The EV could bring an empty barrel, and swap it for the full one, and take that water to one of our partner's sites, DECA City Farms probably, where additional food production was occurring and there may be additional water needs, or just a preference rain with some extra goodies in it plants will like, and no chlorine they won't like. Having dropped off several full rain barrels the EV van with a liftgate would be empty and able to haul crops from the other farm to either locations where canning, jarring, pickling, etc could occur, or directly to a sales point or a free distribution point like a food bank, church, park, or community center.

This torque-intensive, low-milage journey is a perfect fit for the strengths of EV's, and it would likely return to its charger at Ramboland with a lot of remaining battery charge, which if it the nanogrid decided it made sense for economic or energy resilience reasons, could power the house or charge its batteries or those batteries placed in neighboring houses to prevent refrigerated food loss or medical device power loss during a blackout.

Likewise, the EV's could actually deliver charged batteries from energy surplus producing sites, to energy deficit suffering YIMBY partners as well.

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Air Quality / Chemistry Monitoring and Treatment

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Air quality in western modernity has been a bit of a rollercoaster. Before the industrial revolution humanity had seldom (though certainly not never) produced a concentrated pollutant source consistently enough to create lasting outdoor or even indoor air quality threats or problems. Cities became incredibly polluted in the early and mid stages of industrialization, so much so that those that could live outside of them did so. Regulation and other factors that moved industry out of urban centers from urban poor, to rural poor areas, essentially diluted the contamination enough that it became somewhat less severe issues for broader areas. The Clean Air Act and its sibling Clean Water Act substantially reduced the negative impacts of industry, which had been radically disproportionately impacting poor and non-human living beings. Regulation and enforcement have continued to struggle to keep up with the propagation of new sorts of industries and their new contaminates, and other factors like corporate lobbying and politicians susceptible to it have hindered their effectiveness. But generally the arc of outdoor air quality over nearly the last century and half has been mostly a trend in the healthier direction, with ozone loss for a time, and throughout the century greenhouse gas emissions as indirect health impacts of air contamination steadily rising.

In the mid to late stages of industrialization our industries were producing new chemicals for household and other products at a rate well beyond what testing, medical and health analysis could keep pace with. Fashion trends in architecture and interior design at times exacerbated this, while health and green building rating systems at least pointed the way to often cost-effective avoidance of indoor health threats from products and materials, albeit without really moving the bell-curve of building industry practice all that much. It would be fair to say that have substantially impacted product and material manufacturing, leveraging the PR and marketing motives of building product manufacturers, though greenwashing still runs rampant. Much of these
efforts fall short of proper prioritization and accurate technical considerations however, and the air chemistry being brought to bear on Ramboland is rarified air, both literally and figuratively (sorry, couldn't resist).

By 1. maintaining a simple material palette, 2. maximizing material reuse, 3. being highly critical of chemical content in all products and materials selected, 4. resorting to new materials only when necessary and via local and scientifically validated and/or certified content, as well as 5. introducing filtration and other treatment within rooms and sometimes within HVAC systems (whichever is more effective in terms of air quality, and often also hard costs, and addressing other air quality issues like temperature and humidity as well) Ramboland will have amongst the most pristine air of any building. This 'optimization sequence' ensures maximum performance and minimal cost. Ongoing air quality testing will add insight and prompt responses to air quality impacts materials and products introduced by occupants (clothes, accessories, food, and other belongings) as well as activities like cooking, bathing, cleaning, and respirating, further strides will be made in controlling for and maintaining super healthy air quality beyond design and construction stages, in a way that can be accessed by education systems and the public at large.
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Kitchen: Pull-down Upper Cabinets

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Storage can be a serious challenge in spaces with high levels of mobility accessibility. Limitations on what can be reached by various folks is not only limited, but often mutually exclusive. I.e. some folks can't reach things down low easily, others can't reach things up high, both for various reasons. Universal Design is an aspiration, a north star that perhaps can never truly be reached, but it can get us a lot of progress in checking ourselves against it, and repeatedly asking ""how can we make this better for more people?""

The kitchen at Ramboland is packed with examples of this, one of our favorites being the pull-down cabinets. There are several versions of this on the market; some allow you to pull the ""guts"" of the cabinet straight down out of the bottom of the cabinet carcass (that's what they call the outer enclosure of cabinets), so that the bottommost shelf in an upper cabinet can be the whole down at counter height, or perhaps even lower if the counter itself can also drop. Others allow those guts to both come down and forward. Still others bring the entire carcass and its guts the whole way down and to the front edge of the counter.

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Kitchen: Height Adjustable Mobile Island

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The split, height adjustable, and mobile island maximizes use of space, surface activity utilization and accessibility. In order to maximize human mobility in the space we have used up a lot of extra square footage for clearance for wheelchairs, etc. This is a bit at odds with our intentions around material and energy use efficiency, because the greater space requires a larger envelope, and that also yields a greater volume of air. Together these increase both the embodied energy and energy use
during its occupancy and useful life, to run mechanical systems to supplement our passive designs, to keep the air comfortable and healthy. So, we had some making up to do by optimizing space. We sought to make both of the main rooms in the house as multi-purposeful as possible.

This one piece of furniture will allow the room to function as a large kitchen, a generous dining room, a spacious living room, a social space, and often any desired combination of these. Not only is this much more convenient and "universal." but it also helps offset the extra square footage and clearances included for mobility improvements.
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Kitchen: Low Refrigeration and Dishwasher

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Nothing super innovative here, honestly. Tried and true, energy star certified under-counter freezer (left) and refrigerator (right) and dishwasher (further right, beside sink because it uses water) with a wheelchair pull-in between/beside all of them. The prep space between the two refrigeration units is set at desk height, though may be adjustable. We're leaving the space above the counter on top of the refrigerator open in case an additional refrigerator is desired, or for coffee/espresso machines, toasters, air fryer, or other small appliances.

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YIMBY - Energy Production

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YIMBY - Energy Sharing / Resilience

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Bedroom: Convenience Vanity/Sink and Indoor Green Roof

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There is a convenience lavatory/sink in the bedroom as well – this is just that, convenience. Especially for care-givers convenience in having rapid access to a sink and faucet in the bedroom for drinking or cleanup needs. Like the kitchen sink and faucet, an additional control is included here to manage the low amounts of irrigation the indoor green roofs in both spaces will require – which will also assist in dust control on those horizontal out of reach areas, and the green roofs will help to moderate air contaminants, oxygen levels, and humidity levels, not to mention provide a biophilic (Insert definition link) psychological benefit.

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Hot water system

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Recent innovations in hot water heaters have led not only to a more widely available energy efficient option than typical gas fired or even old electric water heater technology. But hot water heat pumps have also introduced a new source of cool air. As these units produce hot water buy pulling energy out of the air, they expel cooled air. In the winter this can be a bit of problem, because you’re effectively placing a small air conditioner, usually in your basement, during months you’re already spending too much energy on heating. We will exhaust this cooled air to the outside of the building in these months. But precooling the air in our mechanical room in the warmer months is a benefit.

Coupled with a few hot water solar panels on the roof, not only will we be able to produce all the hot water we need using very little energy, but we are also investigating a warmwater, subsurface irrigation system to supplement heating in the greenhouse and even extend growing seasons in outdoors raised beds. One of the many living-lab experiments we’ll be doing early on.
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Kitchen: Custom split 4 burner induction cooktop.

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For those that have never had to worry about lateral mobility once they learned to walk, it may not be obvious why you would split a cooking range in half to put a prep space in the middle of it. Sliding back and forth laterally in a typical wheelchair is hard enough, let alone while handling sharp knives and hot pots, pans, and foods. If chefs and home cooks alike who rely on wheelchairs and can use their hands effectively can do all their prep in one position and move pots, pans, and foods on and off of induction burners without having to reach down and grab their wheels or electric chair controls to reposition over and over again, it could take a lot of the difficulty out of cooking.

Induction technology makes this easier than ever before, not to mention they are safer because the surface is not heated directly, and usually safe to the touch even immediately after or even during cooking. Most units also allow you to set an exact temperature. This is a big part of why, although some debate wages on, many of the world's most respected chefs and cooks feel that induction cooktops are the best way to go, even better than natural gas burners that introduce contaminants to the breathing zone along with the methane, which we're* finding leaks not only in our homes whether the appliances are in use or not, but throughout our cities from the gas lines. This introduces significant explosion and air quality risks, in addition to the negative environmental impacts on par or beyond any other fossil fuel**.

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Super-High Efficiency Heating/Cooling System

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Having already designed a building envelope that allows wind and sun to do more of the cooling and heating when its needed most, and as little as possible when its not wanted, the remaining heating and cooling loads (link to definition) are quite small. This “downsizing” or “right-sizing” (link to definition) allows significant cost savings, and depending on how a project decides to think about it, it could be considered to create an allowance that can be spent to get more expensive technologies - which could still cost less than typical because they’re so much smaller.
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Universal Design: Suspension System

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For much of the design process we have planned to provide an overhead track system to support a hanging mechanism that allows Ron, visitors, and/or future residents to be comfortably suspended, and moved easily around the house to key fixtures, appliances, furniture, etc., by a caregiver or their own control interface. Accommodating this structurally and architecturally was challenging and increasing complicatedness and cost. Getting it through doors, and to all those locations was particularly challenging. We recently expanded the track idea to go throughout the entire house however, rationalizing that the track itself was not the costly part, and it even being a somewhat fun ""ride"" for some fit well with the theme park implications of the project name. And yet it was still not universal in the access it granted and getting more over-the-top than might be reasonable even for this swing-for-the-fences project. And then it occurred to us that maybe we could hang the components that actually suspend our bodies from a floor-based mobile unit, something like an engine block lift. We thought this was very clever. In what couldn't even be considered an ""ah ha"" moment, but more like a ""yeah duh"" moment, we realized these make those already. Of course they do. They can fit through doors, turn and move along on casters, change height and orientation for different fixtures, furnishings, and appliances, and more. They can be operated by motor, or caregiver elbow grease.

That said, if we're not able to get the one we want, we may still modify an engine block lift! Which might actually be cooler and cheaper, and perhaps our partners who work and learn in fabrication and robotics labs might help us make that!
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Counter-intuitive / Outside the Box Thinking

This is a great example of the outside-the-box, creative contortions we find ourselves in when we audaciously step into extremely aggressive goals with a world-class team, working from regenerative thinking and integrative principles. Several of these ideas fly directly in the face of longstanding environmental movement dogma, so we invite you to not reject or accept these ideas before really considering them in their context and in terms of their effects, and what paradigms and assumptions you are sitting in as you do so.
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Kitchen: Height Adjustable Sink

The height adjustable sink, which uses flex hose to allow fixture movement, provides a wheelchair pull-in space beside the adjacent appliances regardless of which height those are set at, and of course access to the sink itself.

The sink will also have an additional metered faucet control. Metered faucets are those activated usually by pushing down a knob and which then run for a specific amount of time. The button or knob slowly pops up stopping water flow when it has returned to its deactivated original position. This metered control will not control a faucet that pours into this sink however. This is a manual backup for the
irrigation system for the indoor green roof (link to vignette) just beyond the top of the kitchen wall, which caps the mechanical room behind it. The primary faucet will be a sensor activated basic kitchen faucet. We will likely also provide a typical sprayer that can also be held and activated by a button on the sprayer head.

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AUTOMATION NOTE

With the help of our accessibility automation and IOT advisor**** we will be tech-enabling as much of this as off-the-shelf AI assistants and IOT allows, but with manual operation overrides/alternatives whenever possible as well, for the sake user preferences and
instances of system failure (power or connective loss).
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PRODUCT DONATION NOTE

Unless we get these systems donated for all needs, our plan is to demonstrate and test a variety each one of these features, and highlight them over time, sharing our findings in blogs, social media posts, and in our educational materials with local and worldwide education partners.
If you're a product manufacturer that wishes to donate your product for one or more unit or typology, and thus be highlighted in all future press and education about the project, you can contact us at the project email listed on the website. Likewise, if you'd like to sponsor one or the whole array of these innovations, feel free to contact us.
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ACCESSIBILITY PROGRESS NOTE

The passing of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) was a watershed moment and has been critical to especially new buildings and infrastructure systems becoming more supportive to more levels and types of mobility. But the victory did seem to result in a waning of effort to keep making progress, especially with regard to considering other sorts of capability differences amongst our population. That said, in the last 10 or so years there have been many product innovations and a rekindling of the discussion about to move toward universal support of all humans, and even other living beings, in the design movement's discourse.
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Bathroom: Accessible Bath Tub

The bathtub itself is a wheelchair-transfer walk-iIn tub with a fast fill Faucet, and massage jets. The orthopedic and quality of life benefits of this are clear. And like the pot-filler* in the kitchen space, flow-rate is irrelevant, in terms of water usage, because you'll put the same amount of water into the tub regardless of how fast it gets there. Getting it there faster will also save a small amount of energy because less heat will be lost before use.

The bathtub is set up like a peninsula extending into the bathroom instead of with its long side against a wall, as would be the typical way to place it. This is so that care-givers can access the tub from any of 3 sides, including the one where the sink is. The opposite side is the one with the door for transfer. Not only will this be much easier to get in and out for someone reliant on a wheelchair, but it will also enable a very easy transfer using the suspension system dolly**. There is also a floor drain on that side as well tied to the recirculating shower***.

Enabling this level of self care and care-giver ease is very rare, and therefore worth the additional financial cost. Most of us that are more mobile-able take for granted the luxury of being able to shower or take a bath, not only for convenience but the significant mental health benefits.

The fact that the water in this house will be unparalleled in terms of its purity also means that the steam generated in the bathroom will have far fewer contaminants, keeping the indoor air at a higher quality.

This approach is not only much safer – it’s also something that has long been out of reach for many people with mobility challenges. Bathing and showering can be too risky for them and their caregivers, largely because they only have consistent access to non-accessible bathrooms like the one shown in this image of Ron’s current setup. These are the types of facilities typically found in apartments that people with mobility impairments can afford when relying on state subsistence benefits. While programs do exist to support modifications even in rental units, landlords are often unwilling to allow them, or the small square footage and other architectural limitations make renovations cost-prohibitive.

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Planet Scale Landing Page Version

Ramboland is a universal design and community health demonstration project and living laboratory. This site is it's digital twin. It is, and always will be in a state of becoming, like it's real-world twin. The twin's will be increasing integrated with each other and into educational programs, through onsite sensors, data streams, bioregional digital twins, human reporting, and mixed reality and large-language-model (AI) interfaces. Among many other things these will spread the word about the higher possibilities for our built environments to produce living and economic value, and support the health and wealth generation of our most neglected and abused communities. Please, join team Rambo... integrate it into your learning and teaching, donate, explore, contact us, partner, and post about it!
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Laundry - Washer/Dyer

The washer/dryer unit is placed in the mechanical room for convenience, and shortens pipe length from treatment systems to all fixtures and appliances using treated rain for washing and irrigation. This will also slightly post/pre-heat return air before it is exhausted through an energy recovery ventilator (ERV) or cycled back into the house. This is also creating a warmer pocket of air on the northern wall, and is what's called "waste heat capture," which is good because Lancaster will remain a "heating load dominant" climate for at least the next couple of decades.
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Energy Delivery

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Kitchen: Height Adjustable Double Appliance

As with our split cooktop (link to vignette) our design team, including our accessible equipment advisor, have come up with an approach to some of the appliances, which we think will increase accessibility for more folks. By placing two half-height appliances together –one above and one below a height adjustable counter section –, the full size microwave, and an oven can both become highly accessible while using up minimal space.
When the counter is raised a person using a wheelchair could also pull in under the oven, and likely reach both appliances, with really easy access to the oven. When the pair are lowered the whole way to a point at which the oven is on the floor, the microwave could be all the way down to under counter height, and easily accessed from the front, or by someone in a wheelchair who has pulled in beside it under the sink.

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Bathroom: Cool Toilet

And then of course there is the elephant in the bathroom – the toilet. Although we will not be going with a $6,000 Japanese toilet, we will be selected one with excellent geometry for caregiver and user ease, as well as either a built-in or bolt-on bidet and tushy dryer, which are becoming readily and affordably available in the market, and a great help to everyone involved.

Flushes greywater

""Japenese"" toilet features like a bidet and dryer improve experience for both users and caregivers.

A custom designed pedal mechanism as a second option for flushing (which will simply pull down on the dual-flush flush-valve handle) improves hygiene when usable, by allowing hand contact with the fixture to be avoided. In some cases it will also improve accessibility when 1. a user has the ability to step on it but not otherwise operate a flush mechanism higher up, or 2. a user of a wheelchair can maneuver it to run over the pedal.

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Universal Design: 40" Doors

36 inch wide doors, per the minimum requirements of ADA (link to reference), are what we call barely legal. They're just good enough, not great. Someone relying on a wheelchair can easily still lose some knuckle skin going through a 36" wide door if they're self-propelling. Because they are so common, standard doorways have an economy of scale (link to definition), and so they are cheaper than most other sizes. Despite this we felt it made sense to take a stand and specify 40" wide doors everywhere at Ramboland. Economies of scale only occur when something is legally standardized, or sells enough because of demand. Let's drive up demand for safer, better doors.

For much of the design process we have planned to provide an overhead track system to support a hanging mechanism that allows Ron, visitors, and/or future residents to be comfortably suspended, and moved easily around the house to key fixtures, appliances, furniture, etc., by a caregiver or their own control interface. Accommodating this structurally and architecturally was challenging and increasing complicatedness and cost. Getting it through doors, and to all those locations was particularly challenging. We recently expanded the track idea to go throughout the entire house however, rationalizing that the track itself was not the costly part, and it even being a somewhat fun "ride" for some fit well with the theme park implications of the project name. And yet it was still not universal in the access it granted and getting more over-the-top than might be reasonable even for this swing-for-the-fences project. And then it occurred to us that maybe we could hang the components that actually suspend our bodies from a floor-based mobile unit, something like an engine block lift. We thought this was very clever. In what couldn't even be considered an "ah ha" moment, but more like a "yeah duh" moment, we realized people make those already. Of course they do. They can fit through doors, turn and move along on casters, change height and orientation for different fixtures, furnishings, and appliances, and more. They can be operated by motor, or caregiver elbow grease.

That said, if we're not able to get the one we want, we may still modify an engine block lift! Which might actually be cooler and cheaper, and perhaps our partners who work and learn in fabrication and robotics labs might help us make that!
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Bathroom: The best shower in the tri-state area!

"Recirculating shower saves 90% of energy and 85% of water compared to code. High-flow shower head for convenience and quality of life.

Many do not fully appreciate some of the luxuries and coping mechanisms we have in our society, nor realize that many don’t have safe or frequent access to them. For example, showers. In Ron’s current subsistence level living situation, it is unsafe for him to take a shower as well as it is unsafe for his caregivers to assist him during a shower. Because of that, he relies mostly on sponge bathing, as do millions of other people with limited mobility. The shower installed at Rambolandwill allow Ron (and ultimately other users) to have access to a full soaker tub with a door that allows a suspension system to carry him safely and conveniently in and out of it. The tub is positioned in such a way that caregivers can reach in from 3 of the 4 sides, a rare convenience. The bathroom will also feature a high-flow shower head next to the bathtub that he can enter independently in a wheelchair or with support of the suspension system and enjoy a better shower experience.

How does this comply with our other environmental goals? Well, the showering system we are installing is called a recirculating shower. Despite its high-flow rainforest shower head, it saves almost 90% of both water and energy compared to a code compliant 2.5 gallon per minute showerhead. This is because unlike standard showers that lose all the water and heat after it passes over our bodies and down the drain only once, water in this system will recirculate about 7 times before being drained. This is possible because the shower has built-in treatment, filtration, and temperature regulators, which also ensure cleaner water than typical tap water and allow for a perfectly controlled water temperature, making them safer in terms of burns and cold shocks – a greater risk with users that have speech challenges.

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EV Delivery Vehicle

This is a great example of the wacky, creative contortions we find ourselves in when we audaciously step into extremely aggressive goals with a world-class team, working from regenerative thinking and integrative principles. Several of these ideas fly directly in the face of longstanding environmental movement dogma, so we invite you to not reject or accept these ideas before really considering them in terms of their effects, and what paradigms and assumptions you are sitting in as you do so.

Research (get from Noah Zallen at Introba) and projects are indicating that energy microgrids can achieve "islandable" status and produce a far smaller surplus of energy if they have massive and dynamic storage in the form of EV's that are consistently connected to them via two-way chargers. We have wanted to provide a wheelchair modified EV as part of this project all along. Now it may have even more purpose.

This insight from one of our energy engineers (Noah Zallen at Introba) triggered a set of unexpected addtional ideas with one of our civil engineers (Jim Remlin with Sherwood Design Engineers). What if we helped our YIMBY program that expanded the systems approaches to neighbors's yards could jump across streets using the EV. What if instead of direct piping from neighbors' roofs to our cisterns, we placed rain barrels at YIMBY houses on other blocks in this and other low-income neighborhoods? It could be calculated based on rainfall and roof collection areas when those barrels would be full. The EV could bring an empty barrel, and swap it for the full one, and take that water to one of our partner's sites, DECA City Farms probably, where additional food production was occurring and there may be additional water needs, or just a preference rain with some extra goodies in it plants will like, and no chlorine they won't like. Having dropped off several full rain barrels the EV van with a liftgate would be empty and able to haul crops from the other farm to either locations where canning, jarring, pickling, etc could occur, or directly to a sales point or a free distribution point like a food bank, church, park, or community center.

This torque-intensive, low-milage journey is a perfect fit for the strengths of EV's, and it would likely return to its charger at Ramboland with a lot of remaining battery charge, which if it the nanogrid decided it made sense for economic or energy resilience reasons, could power the house or charge its batteries or those batteries placed in neighboring houses to prevent refrigerated food loss or medical device power loss during a blackout.

Likewise, the EV's could actually deliver charged batteries from energy surplus producing sites, to energy deficit suffering YIMBY partners as well.

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Air Quality / Chemistry Monitoring and Treatment

Air quality in western modernity has been a bit of a rollercoaster. Before the industrial revolution humanity had seldom (though certainly not never) produced a concentrated pollutant source consistently enough to create lasting outdoor or even indoor air quality threats or problems. Cities became incredibly polluted in the early and mid stages of industrialization, so much so that those that could live outside of them did so. Regulation and other factors that moved industry out of urban centers from urban poor, to rural poor areas, essentially diluted the contamination enough that it became somewhat less severe issues for broader areas. The Clean Air Act and its sibling Clean Water Act substantially reduced the negative impacts of industry, which had been radically disproportionately impacting poor and non-human living beings. Regulation and enforcement have continued to struggle to keep up with the propagation of new sorts of industries and their new contaminates, and other factors like corporate lobbying and politicians susceptible to it have hindered their effectiveness. But generally the arc of outdoor air quality over nearly the last century and half has been mostly a trend in the healthier direction, with ozone loss for a time, and throughout the century greenhouse gas emissions as indirect health impacts of air contamination steadily rising.

In the mid to late stages of industrialization our industries were producing new chemicals for household and other products at a rate well beyond what testing, medical and health analysis could keep pace with. Fashion trends in architecture and interior design at times exacerbated this, while health and green building rating systems at least pointed the way to often cost-effective avoidance of indoor health threats from products and materials, albeit without really moving the bell-curve of building industry practice all that much. It would be fair to say that have substantially impacted product and material manufacturing, leveraging the PR and marketing motives of building product manufacturers, though greenwashing still runs rampant. Much of these
efforts fall short of proper prioritization and accurate technical considerations however, and the air chemistry being brought to bear on Ramboland is rarified air, both literally and figuratively (sorry, couldn't resist).

By 1. maintaining a simple material palette, 2. maximizing material reuse, 3. being highly critical of chemical content in all products and materials selected, 4. resorting to new materials only when necessary and via local and scientifically validated and/or certified content, as well as 5. introducing filtration and other treatment within rooms and sometimes within HVAC systems (whichever is more effective in terms of air quality, and often also hard costs, and addressing other air quality issues like temperature and humidity as well) Ramboland will have amongst the most pristine air of any building. This 'optimization sequence' ensures maximum performance and minimal cost. Ongoing air quality testing will add insight and prompt responses to air quality impacts materials and products introduced by occupants (clothes, accessories, food, and other belongings) as well as activities like cooking, bathing, cleaning, and respirating, further strides will be made in controlling for and maintaining super healthy air quality beyond design and construction stages, in a way that can be accessed by education systems and the public at large.
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Kitchen: Pull-down Upper Cabinets

Storage can be a serious challenge in spaces with high levels of mobility accessibility. Limitations on what can be reached by various folks is not only limited, but often mutually exclusive. I.e. some folks can't reach things down low easily, others can't reach things up high, both for various reasons. Universal Design is an aspiration, a north star that perhaps can never truly be reached, but it can get us a lot of progress in checking ourselves against it, and repeatedly asking ""how can we make this better for more people?""

The kitchen at Ramboland is packed with examples of this, one of our favorites being the pull-down cabinets. There are several versions of this on the market; some allow you to pull the ""guts"" of the cabinet straight down out of the bottom of the cabinet carcass (that's what they call the outer enclosure of cabinets), so that the bottommost shelf in an upper cabinet can be the whole down at counter height, or perhaps even lower if the counter itself can also drop. Others allow those guts to both come down and forward. Still others bring the entire carcass and its guts the whole way down and to the front edge of the counter.

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Kitchen: Height Adjustable Mobile Island

The split, height adjustable, and mobile island maximizes use of space, surface activity utilization and accessibility. In order to maximize human mobility in the space we have used up a lot of extra square footage for clearance for wheelchairs, etc. This is a bit at odds with our intentions around material and energy use efficiency, because the greater space requires a larger envelope, and that also yields a greater volume of air. Together these increase both the embodied energy and energy use
during its occupancy and useful life, to run mechanical systems to supplement our passive designs, to keep the air comfortable and healthy. So, we had some making up to do by optimizing space. We sought to make both of the main rooms in the house as multi-purposeful as possible.

This one piece of furniture will allow the room to function as a large kitchen, a generous dining room, a spacious living room, a social space, and often any desired combination of these. Not only is this much more convenient and "universal." but it also helps offset the extra square footage and clearances included for mobility improvements.
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Kitchen: Low Refrigeration and Dishwasher

Nothing super innovative here, honestly. Tried and true, energy star certified under-counter freezer (left) and refrigerator (right) and dishwasher (further right, beside sink because it uses water) with a wheelchair pull-in between/beside all of them. The prep space between the two refrigeration units is set at desk height, though may be adjustable. We're leaving the space above the counter on top of the refrigerator open in case an additional refrigerator is desired, or for coffee/espresso machines, toasters, air fryer, or other small appliances.

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YIMBY - Energy Production

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YIMBY - Energy Sharing / Resilience

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