Redesign Your Industry

Summary: The shift from standardization to customization is an opportunity for architects to re-design the construction industry.

The 'Model T'

Do you drive a car? Do you drive a Ford? Have you been for a ride in a Model T Ford? Henry Ford’s assembly line represents the pinnacle of the Industrial process. His famous car, the Model T is the epitome of that production process. Did you know that over one million Model T Fords were built. All exactly the same, built over a decade, with barely a single design change. The famous line about the Model T was, "you can have any colour you like, as long as it's black."

This summarizes the Industrial mode of thinking. In a word: standardization.

The battle in those days was simply to make the product. These days it's a little different. With over 30 worldwide producers of cars, there is a little more competition and a lot more choice for the consumer.

Customization

In contrast to the Industrial Age and standardization, the Information Age is all about customization. The customer is king. The key to customization and the manufacturing process is information and when we link information to manufacturing we come up with automation or cybernation. We're not quite at the point of creating Terminators, but robots certainly are the go.

In the same way the car industry is increasing having more and more components assembled by machines, the construction industry will shift more and more to prefabricated units and automatic assembly. This contrasts distinctly with the hands-on craft based production of buildings at present. Whilst this has been offered to the architects in the past with systems housing, these products ultimately failed because they weren't customized to the consumer.

The customization of design is exactly what the architect already offers. The twist here is that the architect can now have the benefits of mass-production whilst producing customized one-off designs.

Two Major Opportunities

There are two major opportunities for the architect here.

The first one is to extend the range of design choices, particularly around non-box forms.

The second is to reinvent and re-design the entire construction industry and to make up new ways to create buildings. Now there's a challenge if anyone's bold enough to take it on.


Related Articles: The Watch Industry, Part 2: In the second part of 'The Watch Industry', we consider the task of reinventing the watchmaking industry through the example of the Swatch Watch.

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