Designing your Home
Design workshops for the User-Science Institute at the Kyushu University in Japan to develop an effective communication platform for architects and clients to co-design future housing.
Clients commission architects to design their dream ‘homes’, ones that reflect both their needs and desires. Conversely, architects aim to design ‘houses’ that demonstrate their excellent skills. Yanki was invited to take part in 2007-2008 for an on-going study in Japan that aims to improve the communication between clients and designers and develop solutions that will narrow the gap between the spatial configurations that clients desire and those that are designed for them. The project was initiated by the User-Science Institute at the Kyushu University in Japan.
Yanki was involved in the planning of two workshops for both designers and clients as part of an action research project that aimed to demonstrate good practice during participatory housing design. The workshop was based on the 3P process: Preferring, Planning and Processing. Different design games of the ‘Design Your Home Pack’ are explained in this paper and the results are shown with further discussion of how to improve the designer-user relationship in order to develop desirable and designable housing projects.
