Understanding Customers’ Behavioral Intention toward Dimensional Customization System
Abstract
Houses are essentially one-of-a-kind products that should reflect the individualized differences of the inhabitants who live in them. Customer demands tend to be heterogeneous, while repetitively-produced houses fail to provide for variability. The productivity, quality, and efficiency of mass production, as a Fordian paradigm of the 20th century, do not offer a promise for product variety. The challenge of housing design is getting the best of both worlds: meeting heterogeneous customer demands without giving up the efficiency of mass-produced industrialized housing. If homebuilders want to obtain customer satisfaction, how should variety affect efficiency in design? Mass customization, as a post-Fordian paradigm of the 21st century, is a way of delivering highly customized products or services while still maintaining mass production efficiency.
Dimensional customization is a suitable paradigm with which to produce one-of-a-kind houses. In that setting, building geometry can be tailored individually by using dimensional parameters to design houses with unique shape and form. Achieving highly customized products demands for effective customer participation. Nonetheless, homebuilders and homebuyers are both captivated by the difficulties that lie behind the flexibility of customized solutions. Due to design complexity, production costs, design intentions, compliance with building codes, and many other design and manufacturing limitations, homebuilders hesitate to allow homebuyers to participate at an early stage of the design process. Allowing customers to intervene in the design process makes it difficult for the designer to ensure that the customer, as a non-expert designer, comes up with valid solutions. From a technological perspective, this recognition can be enhanced by technologies that could provide for automatic constraint validation. If variety and validity come together, the flexibility of customization space offers a promise that every single change as a result of customer participation is valid. This would result in less and less involvement of the designer and the manufacturer to validate and adjust individualized solutions.
Focusing on the implementation of a constraint-based dimensional customization system, this research contributes to understanding customers’ willingness to use a customization toolkit, as an indicator of their behavioral intention toward dimensional mass customization in the context of the prefabricated housing industry. In a customization process, designers are replaced by customers, who may not typically have substantial architectural design knowledge. In that setting, customers should bear the risk of co-design activity; thus, their willingness is highly determined by the trade-off between product and process values, and the challenges perceived during interaction with customization toolkits.
To understand customers’ behavioral intentions, two interconnected experiments have been conducted: first, the formative evaluation served to collect information about the development of the customization toolkit from an expert perspective to improve its technical characteristics before its final implementation; second, the summative evaluation was conducted to understand the influence of knowledge on customers’ willingness to use the dimensional customization toolkit. The results show that participants perceived values in the dimensional customization of houses, and intended to use the customization toolkit. Nonetheless, knowledge is not the only factor that stimulates customers’ engagement in the co-design activity. There are participants with low levels of knowledge (non-expert) who are fairly aware of their demands and can clearly articulate them. However, participants with a higher level of knowledge have more ability to deal with the challenge of product configuration and express their preferences. In a nutshell, the results show that a lack of knowledge does not increase the difficulties in the dimensional customization of houses, and thus can potentially result in finding satisfactory solutions.
Description
Keywords
Architecture, Computer Science
Citation
Khalili-Araghi, S. (2017). Understanding Customers’ Behavioral Intention toward Dimensional Customization System (Doctoral thesis, University of Calgary, Calgary, Canada). Retrieved from https://prism.ucalgary.ca. doi:10.11575/PRISM/28559