Digital Woodoo

Budget

​

A serious piece of research requires a serious introduction! We were asked to collaborate with Architecture 00 to plot the future course of micro-manufacturing and distribution of WikiHouses in the UK for up-and-coming manufacturing startup, Digital Woodoo. Our remit was to examine the construction industry as a landscape ripe for disruption, show how the tide might be turned in favour of communities and community owned businesses and propose a business model for Digital Woodoo.

We showed how:

The current provision of housing is failing even the more basic standards of provision and that the strangle hold that big developers have over the majority of housing is both unsustainable and highly disruptable.

The values of community-led housing groups and innovative small-to-medium sized contractors can be aligned to the mutual advantage of both using WikiHouse. 

A design process based on clear communication, managed expectations and mutual respect could be forged through the adoption of a three staged information exchange standard, the Design Code, Design Guide and Design Passport giving cost certainty but also freedom to these potential partnerships. 

This hypothesis might work in action as we designed ten unique homes that respond to the individual desires of a simulation group of users and the theoretical constraints of both the Design Code and Design Guide. We modelled these people living in their homes over time and showed how each home might be adapted to meet the requirements of many different types of key life changes demonstrating both the flexibility of the WikiHouse system and meeting the requirements for a lifetime home. 

Out of all this we showed how Digitial Woodoo could find a niche as both an advocate of Mass Customised Community Housing and a manufacturer/erector of WikiHouses, championing the causes of communities across the North-West.