720742Web platform for the digital design and distributed manufacturing of homesClosedGRD Development of PrototypeInnovate UKOur 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 & sustainable neighbourhoods. Solutions are available, yet current housing technologies & economies fail to deploy & re-use them because our design & construction industries remain locked behind outdated, inefficient methods & supply chains. This project aims to bring the same sort of disruptions that have transformed software media into the domain of housebuilding, by creating a web platform for one of the first fully digital building systems, WikiHouse: a customisable ‘digital lego’, which can be fully parametrically designed/encoded, digitally fabricated locally using low cost CNC tools & rapidly selfassembled with minimum skill (eg IKEA), resulting in beautiful, precision built, low-energy homes 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 to design & catalogue each project. The platform consists of: 1. Sharing & versioning platform for open, collaborative sharing of design files as open source code (a sort of Github / Wikipedia for architectural design, hence our name). 2. Distributed marketplace of architects, small local manufacturers & contractors using the system (think Airbnb for the construction industry). 3. Suite of in-browser digital tools for parametric design & digital fabrication, all integrated into the above 2 elements. Even the basic, first version of such a platform has the potential to be very disruptive. Not just by making the production of high performance homes much simpler, faster & more affordable, but by breaking our 20thC dependence on centralised, one-size-fits-all, big factory production models & supply chains for prefabrication, bringing the ‘third industrial revolution’ to the construction industry.