Mass Customisation and Personalisation in Architecture and Construction

Poorang Piroozfar, Frank Piller

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135903473
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture General

Challenged by the recent economic crisis, the building and construction industry is currently seeking new orientation and strategies. Here mass customisation is uncovered as a key strategy in helping to meet this challenge. The term mass customisation denotes an offering that meets the demands of each individual customer, whilst still being produced with mass production efficiency. Today mass customisation is emerging from a pilot stage into a scalable and sustainable strategy...

The first dedicated publication of its kind, this book provides a forum for the concept within an applied and highly innovative context. The book includes contributions from some of the most prominent thinkers and practitioners in the field from across the world, including Kasper S. Vibaek, Steve Kendall, Martin Bechthold, Mitchell M. Tseng, and Masa Noguchi. Bringing together this panel of experts who have carried out research both in academia and practice, this book provides an overview of state-of-the-art practice related to the concept of customisation and personalisation within the built environment.

1

Mass customisation and personalisation in architecture and construction: an introduction

Poorang Piroozfar and Frank T. Piller

Abstract

Challenged by a global crisis, the building industry is currently seeking new orientation and strategies. Stakeholders in the built environment are being forced at an extensive and unprecedented pace to improve a set of conflicting objectives. On one hand, they want to enhance the cost efficiency and economic sustainability of their constructions. On the other hand, the market demands that the functional performance, indoor quality, comfort levels and social sustainability of the buildings shall be increased. And at the same time, building professionals concentrate on the reduction of energy consumption, the ecological footprint of a building process and its carbon emission, boosting the environmental sustainability. Finally, designers also have distinct aesthetic values they would like to realise in their design. This apparently conflicting set of goals demands a new industrial paradigm in the built environment. In industrial markets, mass customisation emerged more than two decades ago as a paradigm for exactly this purpose – offering highly customised products with mass production efficiency. From its origins in machinery and IT hardware mass customisation recently gained growing popularity in consumer goods industries. In particular, the advent of the internet enabled its introduction in many markets. This chapter briefly recaps this development and provides a common understanding of the elements of mass customisation as a business paradigm. In addition, the individual chapters in this handbook are introduced.

What is Mass Customisation?

The recent economic crisis has placed efficiency and cost-cutting back on the agenda of executives and entrepreneurs worldwide. Yet, cost cuts should not be blindly pursued at the risk of damaging the long-term strategy and value proposition of an organisation. As in the end, the famous saying by Peter Drucker still holds true: ‘It is the customer who determines what a business is’ (Drucker, 1954). In the very sense of this statement, the ability to manage a value chain from the customers’ point of view determines the competitiveness of many companies. In many industries, firms today are faced by an uninterrupted trend toward heterogeneity of demand (Franke et al., 2009; Zuboff & Maxmin, 2003). In particular, consumers with great purchasing power are increasingly attempting to express their personality through individual products. Thus, manufacturers are forced to create product port folios with an increasing wealth of variants, right down to the production of units of one. As a final consequence, many companies have to process their customers’ demand individually. To address this opportunity, new technologies today provide several opportunities that have not been available before. Flexible manufacturing technologies have reduced the typical trade-off between individuality and efficiency. Modern information technology has enabled pervasive connectivity and direct interaction possibilities among individual customers and between customers and suppliers. This connectivity offers an enormous amount of additional flexibility. Yet despite all the technological advances, this is by no means a straight forward task. Particularly in today’s highly competitive business environment, activities for serving customers have to be performed both efficiently and effectively at the same time.

Since the early 1990s, mass customisation has emerged as one leading idea for achieving precisely this objective. Davis, who initially coined the term in 1987, refers to mass customisation when ‘the same large number of customers can be reached as in mass markets of the industrial economy, and simultaneously […] be treated individually as in the customized markets of preindustrial economies’ (Davis, 1987: 169). A more pragmatic definition was introduced by Tseng and Jiao (2001). According to them, mass customisation corresponds to ‘the technologies and systems to deliver goods and services that meet individual customers’ needs with near mass production efficiency’ (Tseng & Jiao, 2001: 685). In the following, we define mass customisation in accordance with Joseph Pine (1993) as ‘developing, producing, marketing, and delivering affordable goods and services with enough variety and customisation that nearly everyone finds exactly what they want’.

When the subject of mass customisation is raised, the successful business model of the computer supplier Dell is often cited as one of the most impressive examples. The growth and success of Dell is based on this firm’s ability to produce custom computers on demand, meeting precisely the needs of each individual customer and producing these items, with no finished goods inventory risk, only after an order has been placed (and paid for).

But beyond Dell, there are many other examples of companies that have employed mass customisation successfully. Consider the following examples:

• Pandora Radio relieves people of having to channel surf through radio stations to find the music they like. Customers submit an initial set of their preferred songs, and from that information Pandora identifies a broader set of music that fits their preference profile and then broadcasts those songs as a custom radio channel. As of summer 2010, Pandora.com had 48 million listeners who created more than half a billion radio stations from the 700,000 tracks in its library and who listened for 11.6 hours per month on average.
• BMW customers can use an online toolkit to design the roof of a Mini Cooper with their very own graphics or picture, which is then reproduced with an advanced digital printing system on a special foil. The toolkit has enabled BMW to tap into the custom after-sales market, which was previously owned by niche companies. In addition, Mini Cooper customers can also choose from among hundreds of options for many of the car’s components, as BMW is able to manufacture all cars on demand according to each buyer’s individual order.
• American Power Conversion (APC) sells, designs, produces, and installs complex infrastructure systems for data centers (Hvam et al., 2008). Obviously, these systems need a large degree of customisation, with regard to the building environment where the data center is deployed and the performance and functional features of a particular technical setup. After changing from an engineer-to-order to a mass customisation strategy, APC saw a reduction of its overall delivery time for a complete system from around 400 to 16 days. Also, production costs were signifi cantly reduced (by factors of 30–40 per cent). These drastic improve ments were the result of implementing a modular product architecture and the mandatory use of a product configuration system for sales and order processing. In addition, modularisation also allowed the company to split its manufacturing into a mass production of standard components in the Far East, and an order-based final assembly at various production sites around the world within close customer proximity.

What do these examples have in common? Regardless of product category or industry, they have all turned customers’ heterogeneous needs into an opportunity to create value, rather than regarding heterogeneity as a problem that has to be minimised, challenging the ‘one size fits all’ assumption of traditional mass production (Salvador et al., 2009). This is the essence of mass customisation and its foremost idea.

From Cars to Buildings

And how about buildings, architecture and urban systems? The individual creative architect, designing a unique solution for a client and the specific requirements and opportunities of a dedicated site for a specific project in a particular setting, can be considered as one of the fundamental applications of customised value creation. The same holds true for the design of urban spaces and structures as well as commercial premises and civil infrastructures which have always been driven by an ultimate, almost extreme degree of customisation.

So why a book about mass customisation in the built environment, defined as the building, construction, interior design, architecture and urban planning? Challenged by a global crisis, this industry is currently seeking new orientation and strategies. Stakeholders in the built environment are being forced at an extensive and unprecedented pace to improve a set of conflicting objectives. On one hand, they shall enhance the cost efficiency and economic sustainability of their construc tions. As every builder and home owner will confirm, the robustness and efficiency of the building processes are often not given up on. There is a lot of (process) customisation, but no ‘mass production efficiency’. On the other hand, the market demands that the functional performance, indoor quality, comfort levels and social sustainability of the buildings shall be increased. And at the same time, builders shall concentrate on the reduction of energy consumption, the ecological footprint of a building process and its carbon emission, boosting the environmental sustainability. This apparently conflicting set of goals demands a new industrial paradigm in the built environment.

In addition, the public is getting increasingly annoyed by the dominant design traditions which are reused over and over again, changing traditionally unique patterns of city landscapes into an exchangeable and increasingly standardised (not to say boring) system. So we do not need less, but more customisation in the built environment – but customisation that is delivered in a new and innovative way. Mass customisation could become the key strategy to meet this challenge and has been discussed recently in larger intensity in the communities of architecture and urban planning. Digital CAD technologies, the requirement for sustainable buildings, the advent of the ‘New Pre-Fab’ movement (illustrated by the successful exhibition in the MoMa New York), and new interaction technologies at the customer interface have enabled innovative entrepreneurs to establish new strategies for the larger built environment.

Consider the following examples of mass customisation in the built environ ment:

• Backed by the proprietary Toyota Production System, Toyota Homes was launched in the 1970s and soon afterwards developed and transferred the car production models and strategies to off-site production of housing. Toyota homes can be considered as a full application of the mass customisation system. Benefitting from a fully vertical integration of the production process, Toyota Homes have managed to accommodate all the expertise required for design, production and assembly of residential buildings. The market forefront of the system is a semi-self-contained configuration system which can be started off by the customers or in close collaboration with the sales team at Toyota Homes to help the customers customise their homes based on their needs and within the range of the configurable elements/options. The configuration is then automatically transferred into the production system (off-site manufacturing of all components on an assembly line).
• Shading devices on the outer facades of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France in Paris represent an example of customisable facade, where the users can choose to open or close the laminated vertical timber louvers to strike a balance between the desired level of natural lighting inside the building and the heat gain of the internal spaces, thereby maintaining the indoor comfort light and heat levels. When open, the light and the heat from the sun gets into the building, and when closed, the internal secondary facade performs as the internal layer of a double-skin facade, and the trapped heat can be ventilated out of the building. This facade is a typical application of an adaptable, hence customisable, building design.
• UK-based Yorkon is a manufacturer of steel-framed modular buildings. Exten sively relying on its mother company Portakabin, a provider of modular buildings, Yorkon has established itself as a major player in the market of systemised, yet niche constructions. Portakabin’s extensive system of mass pro duced modular units, construction site accommodation and events buildings has given Yorkon the opportunity to offer its clients more choice, while benefit ting from economies of scale of the corresponding mass produced units. For example, Yorkon can offer a full range of the cladding options including regional stone, York stone, timber, brick, terracotta, render, metal and composite panels; or roof options including flat, pitched, vaulted and glazed, giving its client many design options. All these options, however, are being delivered at much lower cost than a traditional builder.

Yet despite these examples and the growing need for change in the construction industry, there has been no dedicated publication focusing on the topic of mass customisation in the built environment. Our book is a first start to provide a platform for a more focused discussion of its kind. We hope it will become a forum to illustrate applications and conceptual contributions on mass customisation and personalisation in the built environment, which have been around for some time, but where no documentation and intellectual debate has existed.

An Overview of this Book

Focusing on the customer or the end-user in the built environment, our book presents innovative strategies building on the idea of mass customisation and personalisation in the built environment. We want to equip service providers in, or facilitators of, the construction processes, from conception to completion and in its post-occupancy stages, with fresh ideas of what could be possible and of what is already there. Furthermore, this publication also seeks to address new concerns with reference to its main theme, including sustainability, zero-carbon construction and green design, information management and life cycle assessment. The scope also goes further to encompass innovative ideas and concepts which can potentially facilitate the application not only in the targeted context of this book, but also as a general strategy for other disciplines. The book is structured around four different areas.

Part I: Principles of Mass Customisation

This part addresses the principles of mass customisation both as a production model and strategy and with reference to the built environment. In Chapter 2, Frank Piller provides a general introduction to the mass customisation concept, its background and its underlying fundamental capabilities: solution space definition, the design of robust processes and choice navigation. Focusing not on the domain of the built environment, but rather on the traditional fields of application of mass customisation, the chapter documents the state of the art of mass customisation in today’s economy per se.

Chapter 3 transfers some of the advancements of mass customisation in service and manufacturing industries into the built environment. Poorang Piroozfar draws a comparative analysis between the two sectors to point out similarities and differences. This will enable a debate whether mass custom isation and personalisa tion could successfully be applied in the building industry. While the answer apparently is ‘yes’, the chapter concludes with some practical guidelines for successful employment of customisation and personal isation strategies in the built environment in the future.

In Chapter 4, Steven Kendall provides an introduction into a core application of personalisation in the built environment, customised residential fit-out. Customisation of dwellings is intrinsic in built environments whose health results from acts of control by inhabitants, balancing acts of control by community powers. At the same time, property developers, government agencies and even citizen associations suppress customisation because they believe it is inefficient or ‘out of (their) control’. Kendall explores this challenge and discusses how to make customisation efficient and harmonious. Residential fit-out is one solution.

In the last chapter of Part I, Eric Farr extends the scope of the discussion of moves from building to urban spaces and spatial entities. Chapter 5 explores why and how mass customisation of urban spaces and entities, coined ‘spatial mass customisation’, can be supported. The chapter investigates the types of urban spaces that can absorb mass as well as those urban entities with capacities for being customised. It then identifies the customisability of those urban entities that can be used to design, enhance or modify urban spaces, providing also a number of case examples.

Part II: Enab...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• lllustrations
• Contributors
• Foreword
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Part I Principles of Mass Customisation
• Part II Enabling Technologies, Designs, and Business Models
• Part III Practical Applications, Prototypes, and Experiences
• Part IV Future Topics, New Potentials, and Emerging Challenges
• Index