United Nations projects that 68% of the world population will live in urban areas by 2050. This population growth in urban areas will increase demands for housing. Customizable and expandable housing systems that can respond to different needs over time have been extensively proposed as possible solutions for the increasing housing shortage.

On the other hand, advancements in digital design and fabrication technologies instigated an open maker culture that designers also started to acknowledge as the scope of design knowledge expands in range and to a broader community. As a result, the distinct roles attributed to designers and makers started to merge: Designers are becoming both the “information maker” and the “manufacturer of information”. With these transitions in definitions, opportunities for designers to develop new skills emerge. Construction drawings, for instance, now steadily shiſt from measured representations read by the manufacturer to direct instructions to the machine. These changes enable new creative and construction opportunities from component to building scale, bridging the gap between conception and execution of a design idea.

Bringing these two together, in this studio, students designed open-source systems for expandable and customizable housing units. In doing so, they explored and tested their design ideas through physical prototypes in various scales by integrating computational design and fabrication technologies to the design process. The studio continued the research initiated by a previous Design Research Studio offered in Fall 2019 by Benay Gürsoy and Almudena Ribot. The studio project proceeded through individual and collaborative design exercises in three consecutive design stages, preceded by a detailed precedent study on customizable and expandable housing projects for low-income communities that will constitute the backbone of all design stages. While each student will have individual design tasks, students and faculty collaboratively worked towards a publication. Through weekly lectures and tutorials, the studio introduced the students to diverse housing design issues (i.e. program, site, materiality, sustainability), computational and systematic design thinking, digital design and fabrication technologies, and open-source culture in design. Particular attention was given to the analysis, synthesis and generation of systems in various scales, relying heavily on physical prototyping.