User-In-The-Loop: Building Templates for Customized Social Housing

The objective of this paper is to show how the end user can be involved into the whole building process, specifically in social housing. Therefore, the end users preferences are taken into account in order to increase their satisfaction on the product. The first step consists on obtaining the user preferences by means of an enquiry file (http://mbserver.uc3m.es/encuesta.htm). There are about 2.000 surveys fulfilled up today. The results are analyzed in order to classify users into groups with similar features and family composition. Due to the social housing promotion laws, several building templates are produced as a parallel development. The obtained groups are matched with the pre-existing building templates that fit as best as possible with the users’ preferences. After this matching, each final user is awarded with the correspondent social dwelling. This is the starting point for the process of the detailed design and configuration of the dwelling by the user. One common web portal enables the use of the design and configuration tools.