FabPod: Designing with temporal flexibility & relationships to mass-customisation

Digital workflows spanning from the design to the production of buildings and small installations have received significant recent attention in architectural research [1]. The structuring of these workflows is important for facilitating design collaboration. The successful delivery of ‘non-standard’ projects, with free-form geometries and novel fabrication material can be particularly dependent on such workflow. This paper reports on the workflow developed for the FabPod, an acoustic enclosure for meetings which could be located in an open knowledge work environment. For this project, a broad ‘design system’ was developed covering the project workflow from early stage design to completion of a fabricated prototype. This was implemented in order to defer design decisions, providing improved opportunities for testing detailed material and fabrication aspects of the project. It also facilitated collaboration between experts in different aspects of parametric workflow and in ‘tuning’ acoustic performance. A by-product of this approach is the possibility of using the system as the basis of further iterations and to consider the possibilities of developing the prototype into a product. A deferral of design decisions is a key strategy for mass-customisation. The system displays a number of characteristics and capabilities required for mass-customisation suggesting that a resulting product might hold value in its ability to be customised. In this paper we firstly evaluate the design system in its role for designing and fabricating the research prototype. We then consider the workflow in relation to key capabilities for mass-customisation.