Mass Customization

Mass customization is becoming a huge thing in architecture today. People are designing pods to fit into building and customizing each one before they are sent to the job site. Pods are just one example of a process of customization that is speeding up the construction process. As the expression goes, “time is money.”

Companies are coming up with products everyday that can be massed produced but customized very easily. Everyone wants something unique for himself or herself and yet they want to get it fast. Today at work I made cabinet blocks in AutoCad that we were all going up in 6” increments. Hundreds of cabinet variations companies make to fit into spaces and a customer can customize their kitchen/ bathroom/ workshop with choosing their own cabinets. It is incredible at how many kitchens I can rearranged and come up with something new and customized with those cabinet blocks. Everything these days can be customized for the customer. I have seen cars with customized lights, stickers, licenses plates, windows, etc. design lends itself to an endless list of customizations. If you take multiple floor plans to different houses you can easily see that they are all different; each floor plan fits the need of the client. Not only do clients want something different than everyone else but also designers are as well. Things that are already made limit the designer on what the product can be like or the way it functions. Take the library that we are designing in our studio right now; we have to design around an existing building someone else has already designed. If we had started with a flat lot than the designs would be endless on what people would come up with. However, we are now working with what someone else has originally come up with.

Mass customization can benefit the profession to a certain extent. Time is something that would benefit greatly by mass customization. Clients could come in and picked what they liked and the architect to make sure the space functioned to what the client wanted to use. Money is also something that would benefit in mass customization. When something that is mass-produced it usually cheaper than something that is only made one time. It usually takes the company a lot of time and money to make a template for the product to be made in but once it is made then it is very easy for the company to produce more. The product size can change easily and the client can choose which one suits them best.

Mass customization can really benefit and also hurt the profession depending on whom you asked the question to. As a designer it is hard to think of something being massed produced because it makes me think that I will be limited in what I’m doing. As a designer that is the worst thing possible is being given restrictions on what you can use and how big it can be. However I guess that is more of reality because there will always be restrictions by clients in what they want.

 Picture from: http://www.dezeen.com/2014/06/17/the-pod-guesthouse-australia-whiting-architects-concrete-timber-boxes/