Housing and Communities

[095] Toward a Sustainable Building Process in the Urban Habitat:Stakeholders' Perception Variance on Modularity in Design

Tzen-Ying Ling, Chun-Tsu Lin, Ju-Sen Lin

Keywords:Urban Habitat; Building Process; Sustainable Practice; Stakeholders’ Stand; Modularity in Design

The modular design thinking has been ascertained as conducive to promoting sustainability at all levels of the urban habitat. This opens an opportunity to initiate a system reform to rethink the demographic growth and the reduction of the environmental impact in urban centers; as the habitat faces severe climate challenge and the need to decarbonize; it solicits a circular design concept instilled in modularity for the building process in the built habitat. The fieldwork reported in illustrates the process in ‘function follows form’ of modularization thinking relative acceptance within the industry stakeholders; qualitative data have been gathered from semi-structured interview and a prototype thinking framework was developed. The component analysis determined divergent views between design field experts in related fields. This study ascertained that aside from the spatial domain: (1) environmental domain is influential in the creative process of modularization; (2) offsite-built structure components are developed into modular design that satisfy user’s multitude needs; hence function follows form; (3) advantage such as cleaner production reduces running costs; we further underscored the sustainability implication as the core of this study.