See it in motion
A short profile of the project and its founder, filmed on site:
Tiny Hacker House Anil PattniVideo: “Tiny Hacker House Anil Pattni” · Charbax · via YouTube
How a futurist’s 2010 experiment in shared live/work building became a permanent fixture in Austin’s maker scene — and the person behind it.
Tiny Hacker House is a community incubator and live/work maker space in Austin, Texas, founded by the futurist Anil Pattni in 2010. It brings the people who think about housing, technology and community into the same room — and then hands them tools, a deadline and a reason to build.
By Pattni’s own account, Tiny Hacker House grew out of a simple wager: what would happen if hackers, makers, designers and entrepreneurs actually lived small and built together, instead of meeting once a month and going home? The answer, sixteen years on, is a permanent fixture in Austin’s design and maker scene — a workshop, an event engine, and an advocacy campaign rolled into one.
Anil Pattni is a futurist, designer and community host. He was born and raised in England and immigrated to the United States in 2004, settling in Austin, where he went on to found Tiny Hacker House in 2010. Across his career he has produced and directed more than 300 innovation events — hackathons, makerfaires, design challenges and hands-on build days — and his practice spans futurism, content, digital media and the particular hospitality of getting strangers to make something interesting together over a long weekend.
Pattni documents much of this work in public: his portfolio lives at anilpattni.com and anilpattni.com/tinyhackerhouse, with a maker log on Hackaday and a longer profile in VoyageAustin’s “Meet Anil Pattni of Austin.” The organization’s original home is tinyhackerhouse.org.
Anil Pattni founds Tiny Hacker House in Austin as a small experiment in shared live/work building — a community incubator for hackers, makers and entrepreneurs.
The workshop becomes an event engine: hackathons, makerfaires and design challenges multiply into a body of 300+ produced innovation events.
TinyHackerHouse design challenges reach thousands of students, including a VR-driven experience built for Girlday and an outdoor classroom made with and for girls in STEM.
Field-built housing partnerships — including work with the City of Austin — and the design engine behind the Small Home Village and Alpine Village concepts with WholeTech.
A one-acre live/work community model in Austin: makers live small, share a working shop, and build ideas meant to change the way cities house people.
Homelessness, affordable housing and gentrification — tackled through community-driven entrepreneurship, sustainability and grassroots technology.
A short profile of the project and its founder, filmed on site:
Tiny Hacker House Anil PattniVideo: “Tiny Hacker House Anil Pattni” · Charbax · via YouTube
Tiny Hacker House describes itself as a community incubator, an advocacy campaign, and a working set of grassroots projects taking on homelessness, affordable housing and gentrification through community-driven entrepreneurship, sustainability and innovation. The through-line of every hackathon, dome build and design challenge is the same: inspire, train and connect the next generation of collaborative problem-solvers, then point them at problems that matter at community scale.
If you want the fuller texture of the work, walk through the shop, the live/work model, the events calendar, and the field projects and villages — or read the FAQ.