Web platform for the digital design and distributed manufacturing of homes

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Our cities face a huge housing challenge in the 21st century: to meet the needs of a growing,urbanising society, yet at the same time transition to low energy homes & sustainableneighbourhoods. Solutions are available, yet current housing technologies & economies fail todeploy & re-use them because our design & construction industries remain locked behindoutdated, inefficient methods & supply chains.This project aims to bring the same sort of disruptions that have transformed software mediainto the domain of housebuilding, by creating a web platform for one of the first fully digitalbuilding systems, WikiHouse: a customisable ‘digital lego’, which can be fully parametricallydesigned/encoded, digitally fabricated locally using low cost CNC tools & rapidly selfassembledwith minimum skill (eg IKEA), resulting in beautiful, precision built, low-energyhomes at a very predictable cost.The platform will support the world’s first start-to-finish process for the digital design &fabrication of buildings, along with the automation, software & data integrations necessary todesign & catalogue each project. The platform consists of:1. Sharing & versioning platform for open, collaborative sharing of design files as opensource code (a sort of Github / Wikipedia for architectural design, hence our name).2. Distributed marketplace of architects, small local manufacturers & contractors using thesystem (think Airbnb for the construction industry).3. Suite of in-browser digital tools for parametric design & digital fabrication, all integratedinto the above 2 elements.Even the basic, first version of such a platform has the potential to be very disruptive. Not justby making the production of high performance homes much simpler, faster & moreaffordable, but by breaking our 20thC dependence on centralised, one-size-fits-all, big factoryproduction models & supply chains for prefabrication, bringing the ‘third industrialrevolution’ to the construction industry.