PhD Project
Architectural Design in Industrialised House-Building
My research 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 promote 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 company's 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 of architectural design. 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
Discussion
Fredrik, could you explain a little bit more your second topic: “to enable architectural design”? Isn't the design possible nowadays? What is the present situation?
Thanks. I changed from enable to promote to give the right meaning. The situation today is that the more industrialisation, the less flexibility and the less architectural design option. Where flexibility is needed could it however be enhanced if we focus on customer value and develop appropriate interfaces for product configuration and customization. This would minimize the need for costly platform deviations.
The concept of architectural objects sound interesting and as you say seems suitable for parametrization. I'm interested in hearing more reflections on how this view can reflect customer value compared to a traditional technical bottom-up approach.