Addressing the Adaptive Customization of Timber Prefabricated Housing through Axiomatic Design

The current Italian housing market requires customized high-performance buildings at an affordable cost. Timber building prefabrication represents a suitable way to satisfy this demand, but its application for this purpose is at the moment inadequate mainly due to restrictions of production approaches: the lack of variety of low-cost mass-produced buildings and the high costs of ad-hoc full-customized buildings. In order to provide affordable customized houses, the timber building industry should focus on designs characterized by the combination of mass-produced and customized parts. In this way, clients would have the chance to personalize decisive parts for them, and the building industry can limit costs by the mass production of the others. This strategy involves artefact flexibility and robustness with regard to the architect's viewpoint. Crucial decisions for the achievement of these requirements are made in the conceptual design phase, but in this stage architects’ decision making is not supported by suitable approaches. Axiomatic Design (AD) has been shown to be able to support decision making for the development of concepts that would have the best chance to provide the specified requirements. In this study AD is applied to prefabricated building design in the timber housing industry. Despite limitations placed by timber construction systems, this application results in a prefabricated building system enhanced with regard to robustness and flexibility, and therefore better able to foster designs that satisfy the current housing demand.