ABSTRACT
This chapter describes a framework for developing integrated systems for mass customization, using housing as an illustrative example. The aim of mass customization is to lower the costs through recourse to large-scale production methods, while satisfying the unique requirements of each individual household to guarantee customer satisfaction. In a seminal book, Herbert Simon proposed the notion of The Sciences of the Artificial. The role of these sciences would be to unveil the laws underlying the systems of objects designed by humans, as the role of the natural sciences was to discover the laws governing the natural world. The aim is to devise a “system” that enables one to generate customized products. This system has two main parts: a design system that takes as input the design context and outputs a design; and a production system that takes the design as input and materializes it into a product.
