One topic I want to talk about more, but don’t have a good enough grasp of, is offsite prefabrication for construction. That is, building parts of buildings into larger assemblies in controlled factory environments and bringing the assemblies out to sites. It’s been saving money, reducing mistakes, and making life easier for workers in other industries for a few years now, and it’s coming into the building world slowly, primarily through structure and building system contractors.
Anyway, I can’t give you the details, but watch this video, where some people with New York and Boston accents explain how they and KlingStubbins made prefabrication work for Autodesk’s new Trapelo Road office in Waltham, MA. Via (BIM)x.
Isn’t BIM what the consultancy you work for does? It sounds cool.
I was actually thinking about something along these lines the other day while putting together lots of Ikea furniture. Although there are exceptions, most of the stuff is simply pieces of wood cut to a certain length with holes drilled in the right places. I would imagine (although this is pure speculation) that most of the manufacturing is automated. Further, given the range of different products they produce, it seems likely that reconfiguration of the machinery to produce a new piece of wood is also probably computerized.
It seems like a small leap from that to completely custom prefab furniture and other carpentry. In the same way that automation has made the manufacture of one-off books economically feasible (see:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q946sfGLxm4 A book store in London actually has one), building one’s own custom furniture or cabinetry would much more accessible. Design would obviously still be a challenge for all but the simplest of projects, but open source is one possibility. There is already a vibrant open source electronics community, and I could see one emerging around carpentry as well. Designers could also of copyright and sell their designs without having to secure a deal with a manufacturer. I’d imagine something like this already exists for large scale construction projects with significant wood work, much like the prefab in the above example.
Funny you mention one-off books, I’ve used that kind of service for my portfolio.
This kind of mass-customization has moved into most other industries, as far back as the 70s. But architecture lags behind because of some false starts and bad groupthink. But Ikea is a great example, in that they optimize their design between ease-of-manufacture and attractiveness. The challenge is bringing quality to that technique. Unsurprisingly, the Swedes and the Finns are leading the way.
As for open source, yeah that’s the next step, eventually it may be possible to do just that. Look at Etsy.com, it’s a similar mass-marketing setup for craft products. It’s something my company is looking into.