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What do you think about efforts such as One Laptop Per Child?
Sinclair: I want to hack it, I want to break it. I want to turn it into one laptop per innovation. If you gave me one, I'd take it to the streets of Kenya or India and I'd give them to the most innovative people working in the slums, the guy who's making flip-flops out of recycled plastic bottles. Then you just install some sort of CAD program on there and teach them how to use it so their innovations could be shared. What's the power of improving their living standards if you've got that going on?
Maybe version 2.0 should have the tagline "It's not just for kids" or "One Laptop Per Adult."
How will big environmental changes--in terms of global warming, ecological and manmade disasters, even the high price of energy--affect your work?
Sinclair: Someone was joking that I'm the luckiest architect on the planet because there's no shortage of clients. There's 1.6 billion people living in areas that are going to be flooded as a result of global warming. Most of these are in unplanned settlements. That's a lot of work to be done.
Can I make a $1,000 house? Can I make solar power affordable for someone in the slums of Angola? Is it feasible, and if it is, how can you make it aesthetically beautiful? It's convincing the heads of corporations who fund these initiatives but are saying, "Take the design out." We've kind of bucked that trend and proven you actually do have to design something that's beautiful.
What's the bad side of an open-source community?
Sinclair: The biggest challenge is that we're in the business of constructing things, so there's a health and safety aspect. If it's completely open source and someone takes a design and another design and doesn't follow the legal information included in the design, then what are the ramifications of doing that?
Can you see this model working for other fields?
Sinclair: Industrial design is an obvious one. And what if you had cancer researchers collaborating in an open-source manner and didn't have competitive studies? Instead of billions of dollars wasted, maybe you'll cure cancer...Or education, figuring out open-source curriculums so you're getting multipronged history.
Do you ever talk with people in other fields who are interested in something like the Open Architecture Network?
Sinclair: I've talked to a lot of doctors who do AIDS-related projects in Africa. It's their biggest challenge trying to share information with each other.
When you say "open source," the people who make money from it get worried, so there's a lot riding against open principles. But Linux and Drupal can do it. That's the beauty of the world we live in. You don't need one big giant to control everything.
Is the site still just in English?
Sinclair: It's a big problem. We just need to find volunteer translators. Really important are Chinese, Hindi, Swahili--right there I've just named 3 billion people, half the planet.
Do you run into resistance when you travel?
Sinclair: We've had death threats, all sorts of things because we were shaking up the apple cart, trying to make people more self-sufficient.
Death threats coming from...?
Sinclair: All over the place. We've done some gender violence projects, whether it be pimps in Calcutta or bandits or people who are controlling corrupt officials, they're going to be upset. We're an easy target seen as protecting or giving empowerment to a community that has been disenfranchised for many years.
We don't believe in making placards. It's a waste of wood. We'd rather build houses. 
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