Opportunities and challenges to mass customise low-income housing in Brazil

Mass Customization (MC) stands for the ability to develop high value-added products within short time frames and at relatively low costs. Although this strategy has been successfully applied in several industries, in construction it has been mostly limited to a few companies that produce factory-built and manufactured homes. In Brazil, where traditional construction techniques are majorly adopted in low-income housing programs, there have been many critics regarding the excessive standardization and thus, non-consideration of the increasing diversity of households and their specific needs. Such standardization is mainly due to the use of mass production core ideas as a way to achieve low costs. The aim of this paper was then to explore the possibilities of adopting mass customization in this context. Two existing low-income housing programs in Brazil were investigated. The discussion on the opportunities and challenges to introduce mass customization ideas in these programs are based on the analysis of the product development process, as well as an analysis of household profiles and needs. The results indicated that the household profile is very diverse in low-income housing. Thus, demand for customization is high, as well as attributed to different products’ characteristics. However, the product development process in this context was found to be very different from a process of mass customized products. Despite the need to modify such process, it was identified that mass customization can be achieved in a variety of ways, and does not necessarily imply on the modernization of construction techniques. However, a major challenge for achieving higher customization in this context seems to be related to the programs’ rules and how it restraints innovation and diversity. Keywords: product development process, low-income housing, mass customization, value managemen

Customization principles of an aeronautics SLM environment and an illustration on aeronautics use cases: the doors management system and the flight control system

International audienceHaving efficient means to build an appropriate system engineering framework is a differentiating factor for the competitiveness of the European aeronautics industry. We present in this paper an approach and a set of concepts enabling the construction and customization of a system engineering environment. These customization principles, set up in the frame of the CESAR project, are driven by a multi-view model-based system development process and by a system data description. The flexibility and the benefits of this approach are demonstrated on two industrial cases: the doors management system and the flight control system

A critical review of the use of 3-D printing in the construction industry

3-D printing, which is an automated production process with layer-by-layer control, has been gaining rapid development in recent years. The technology has been adopted in the manufacturing industry for decades and has recently been introduced in the construction industry to print houses and villas. The technology can bring significant benefits to the construction industry in terms of increased customization, reduced construction time, reduced manpower, and construction cost. A few isolated products and projects have been preliminarily tested using the 3-D printing technology. However, it should be noted that such tests and developments on the use of 3-D printing in the construction industry are very fragmented at the time of the study. It is therefore necessary for the building and construction industry to understand the technology, its historical applications and challenges for better utilization in the future. A systematic review shows that 3-D printing technology, after years of evolution, can be used to print large-scale architectural models and buildings. However, the potential of the technology is limited by the lack of large-scale implementation, the development of building information modeling, the requirements of mass customization, and the life cycle cost of the printed projects. It is therefore expected that future studies should be conducted on these areas to consolidate the stability and expand the applicability of 3-D printing in the construction industry

Why Customers Value Mass-customized Products: The Importance of Process Effort and Enjoyment

We test our hypotheses on 186 participants designing their own scarves with an MC toolkit. After completing the process, they submitted binding bids for "their" products in Vickrey auctions. We therefore observe real buying behavior, not merely stated intentions. We find that the subjective value of a self-designed product (i.e., one's bid in the course of the auction) is indeed not only impacted by the preference fit the customer expects it to deliver, but also by (1) the process enjoyment the customer reports, (2) the interaction of preference fit and process enjoyment, and (3) the interaction of preference fit and perceived process effort. In addition to its main effect, we interpret preference fit as a moderator of the valuegenerating effect of process evaluation: In cases where the outcome of the process is perceived as positive (high preference fit), the customer also interprets process effort as a positive accomplishment, and this positive affect adds (further) value to the product. It appears that the perception of the self-design process as a good or bad experience is partly constructed on the basis of the outcome of the process. In the opposite case (low preference fit), effort creates a negative affect which further reduces the subjective value of the product. Likewise, process enjoyment is amplified by preference fit, although enjoyment also has a significant main effect, which means that regardless of the outcome, customers attribute higher value to a self-designed product if they enjoy the process. The importance of the self-design process found in this study bears clear relevance for companies which offer or plan to offer MC systems. It is not sufficient to design MC toolkits in such a way that they allow customers to design products according to their preferences. The affect caused by this process is also highly important. Toolkits should therefore stimulate positive affective reactions and at the same time keep negative affect to a minimum. (authors' abstract

Digital wood craft

In 1995, Robin Evans points out in his book The Projective Cast how the development of techniques changed architecture and the space inhabited in times of Gothic and early Renaissance. We see a parallel phenomenon today, where the interplay of technology and tool gives shape to new design (Kolarevic 2005). Yet in opposition to the interwoven fields of design and craft of the late Gothic, todayis building sector is enormously diversified, and a growing complexity in the building process and number of used materials can be observed. This gives an opposite point of departure into a more integrated field of design and innovation in architectural design and building industry

A study of BIM collaboration requirements and available features in existing model collaboration systems

Established collaboration practices in the construction industry are document centric and are challenged by the introduction of Building Information Modelling (BIM). Document management collaboration systems (e.g. Extranets) have significantly improved the document collaboration in recent years; however their capabilities for model collaboration are limited and do not support the complex requirements of BIM collaboration. The construction industry is responding to this situation by adopting emerging model collaboration systems (MCS), such as model servers, with the ability to exploit and reuse information directly from the models to extend the current intra-disciplinary collaboration towards integrated multi-disciplinary collaboration on models. The functions of existing MCSs have evolved from the manufacturing industry and there is no concrete study on how these functions correspond to the requirements of the construction industry, especially with BIM requirements. This research has conducted focus group sessions with major industry disciplines to explore the user requirements for BIM collaboration. The research results have been used to categorise and express the features of existing MCS which are then analysed in selected MCS from a user’s perspective. The potential of MCS and the match or gap in user requirements and available model collaboration features is discussed. This study concludes that model collaborative solutions for construction industry users are available in different capacities; however a comprehensive custom built solution is yet to be realized. The research results are useful for construction industry professionals, software developers and researchers involved in exploring collaborative solutions for the construction industry

EbbRT: a framework for building per-application library operating systems

Efficient use of high speed hardware requires operating system components be customized to the application work- load. Our general purpose operating systems are ill-suited for this task. We present EbbRT, a framework for constructing per-application library operating systems for cloud applications. The primary objective of EbbRT is to enable high-performance in a tractable and maintainable fashion. This paper describes the design and implementation of EbbRT, and evaluates its ability to improve the performance of common cloud applications. The evaluation of the EbbRT prototype demonstrates memcached, run within a VM, can outperform memcached run on an unvirtualized Linux. The prototype evaluation also demonstrates an 14% performance improvement of a V8 JavaScript engine benchmark, and a node.js webserver that achieves a 50% reduction in 99th percentile latency compared to it run on Linux