Mass Customization and Design Democratization

Parametric design and digital fabrication are enabling non-designers to mass produce non-standard, highly differentiated products – from shoes and tableware to furniture and even houses. The result of these newly available mass customization tools has been a ‘democratization’ of design.

Mass Customization and Design Democratization is the first book to address this recent phenomenon. Demonstrating how the considerable potential of these tools can be realized in practice, it introduces essential technologies and design approaches and provides numerous examples of the latest, cutting edge work from leading design firms, manufacturers and thinkers.

The book examines what mass customization means for architecture and the building industry and investigates its impact on the sector’s most commoditized enterprise – suburban housing. Asking whether design democratization is viable in the current context and exploring what kind of mass customization is possible, useful, and desirable, it poses fundamental questions about the authorship of design and the functional and aesthetic quality of products designed by non-designers.

A highly designed book featuring over 200 color illustrations, this is essential reading for professionals as well as students taking courses in digital architecture, parametric design, and mass customization.

Branko Kolarevic is a Professor at the University of Calgary Faculty of Environmental Design, where he co-founded the Laboratory for Integrative Design (LID) and co-director of the multi-disciplinary Computational Media Design (CMD) program. He has taught architecture at several universities in North America and Asia and has lectured worldwide on the use of digital technologies in design and production. He has authored, edited or co-edited several books, including Building Dynamics: Exploring Architecture of Change (with Vera Parlac), Manufacturing Material Effects (with Kevin Klinger), Performative Architecture (with Ali Malkawi), and Architecture in the Digital Age. He is a past president of the Association for Computer Aided Design in Architecture (ACADIA), past president of the Canadian Architectural Certification Board (CACB), and currently is president of the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture (ACSA). He is a recipient of the ACADIA Award for Innovative Research in 2007 and the ACADIA Society Award of Excellence in 2015. He holds doctoral and master’s degrees in design from Harvard University and a diploma engineer in architecture degree from the University of Belgrade.

José Pinto Duarte is the Stuckeman Chair in Design Innovation and Director of the Stuckeman Center for Design Computing (SCDC) at Penn State, USA. An accomplished scholar with a record of innovative leadership, Duarte guides the ongoing research and direction of the SCDC. After obtaining his doctoral degree from MIT on the mass customization of housing, Duarte returned to Portugal where he helped launch technology-oriented architecture degrees and programs, as well as a digital prototyping and fabrication lab at the University of Lisbon, where he also served as Dean of the Faculty of Architecture. Duarte has an impressive record of uniting academic research and industry, as well as fostering multi-national partnerships. He has served as president of eCAADe, a European association devoted to education and research in computer-aided architectural design. He also helped establish the MIT–Portugal program, and created the Design and Computation research group, which boasts a strong record of interdisciplinary and collaborative research efforts funded by the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT) and private companies.