PhD Project
The aim of the project is to promote architectural design in industrialised house-building. The research topics in the licentiate part will relate to three main areas of interest for industrialised building. First the prerequisities for architectural design in product development. Second how to organize the processes to enable architectural design. And finally third, how to organize the information and ICT to support the design process.
The research work so far has presented a concept of Architectural Objects. The idea of Architectural objects is to represent the building from a user point of view. From a hierarchical top-down view with human activity situations as denominators of the buildings functional, technical and aesthetical properties we can define a building project from such objects. Sets of architectural objects could be designed as part of a companies' product development and constitute configurable parametric object units in a BIM environment. This view as opposed to a more technical bottom-up view represented by single building part and space objects is also more likely to reflect customer value. A model for product configuration with architectural objects will serve as a starting point for further research, where the ideas about architectural objects will be explored further in models for lean product development as well as lean process organization. Case-studies on industrialised house-building systems will show the relevance, and also help specifying requirements on the ICT-support for handling methodologies with architectural objects. The findings will be organized as a theoretical process model supporting architectural design in industrialised house-building, and will be presented in a licentiate thesis, in the end of 2009. A second part focusing on one of the three main areas - product, process or ICT support - is aimed at as a doctoral thesis, expected due 2011.
The project is a part of the research platform Lean Wood Engineering, jointly funded through Vinnova, the universities and the Swedish timber industry.
For further information, please contact: Fredrik Wikberg fredrik.wikberg@caad.lth.se