give CAD to the consumers

At the beginning of the century, industrialized economies were on mass production, mass distribution, mass marketing and mass media. Now, with advances in information and technology there’s a new frontier that is allowing more and more “mass-customization” to be available to consumers at mass-production prices. How will mass customization and co-design effect the architectural design process?  Will consumers be able to have a greater say and input? How much more of a building can be economically designed-to-order rather than right off the shelf? These questions are the few that are plaguing this new idea of mass customization and are important to the students involved in architecture today as we begin to transform the architectural process.

I believe that mass customization will open a variety of doors for the architectural industry and will allow the consumers to be more involved in the design. I feel like this is the window to take the clients and give them a portion of the control, which will make them feel more comfortable in every step when designing and fabricating a building. Some products can be tailored or customized at the retail outlet or dealer, which would be considered post-production customization. Other products may adapt to the user, as for example, the intelligent systems, increasingly available in cars that adapt to your style of driving, which is considered adaptive customization. However, along with these ‘post-production’ forms of customization, it is also possible for the consumer to interact with the design and the manufacturing process to modify the design of the primary product. For many products it will be possible to offer infinite choice. One of the most important distinctions running through all the different senses of mass customization is at what point the consumer becomes involved (design, fabrication, assembly, or post-production) and to what extent does the collaboration begin and end. Everything that encompasses this new idea of customization is becoming increasingly more apparent as it is beginning to be practiced. The consumers are becoming co-designers and the architect is providing more choices that are readily available to the consumer, which in turn, creates an even better relationship between architect and client.

With all these new technologies, I think the real frontier will be putting the computer programs in the hands of the consumers and allowing them to actually be apart of the design process in a way they never could before. Computerization has greatly impacted all aspects of design. Not only has is transformed design processes; it has transformed the kind of the products that can be created. CAD allows multiple designers and other professionals to collaborate in new ways, to visualize different solutions and try out different options, to keep options open longer and design different alternatives in parallel and pick up problems sooner. The design software that designers use has moved from being a tool to being an intelligent environment that can guide and inform the design process. These technologies can be put, with adjustments, in the hands of non-designers, including consumers, to allow them to co-design products by interacting directly with highly flexible manufacturing systems. Instead of designing for consumers, CAD systems will enable design by consumers. This will not only enable the consumer to be apart of every moment in the production of the product, but will also put the mass-customization process in their hands.