Start Date
6-10-2025 9:00 AM
End Date
8-10-2025 7:00 PM
Description
Affordable Housing (AH) remains a critical global issue, especially for economically weaker sections (EWS) of the developing countries like India. Non-affordability of typical building materials, make the EWS choose alternate materials like bamboo, which is traditionally-used in the tropics for being sustainable and affordable. However, challenges related to standardisation and societal perception hinder its mainstreaming. This warrants a holistic design approach like Service Design (SD), connecting different stakeholders involved with AH using bamboo, at the system level. While SD has wide application across different sectors, its role in building industry, remains relatively underexplored. Subsequently, four community-driven Indian initiatives are studied to understand their system diagrams and business model canvases. This is followed by role-changing What-if exercises to envision what could possibly be the SD approach if each of these four businesses attempted to address the issues of AH by bamboo. These role changing exercises lead to learnings that are used as a design response to identify parameters of a SD framework for AH using bamboo.
Citation
Ray, R.,and Mukhopadhyay, P.(2025) Affordable Housing using Bamboo: A Community-driven Service Design Inquiry using Creative What-if Exercises.. https://dl.designresearchsociety.org/servdes/servdes2025/researchpapers/6
Affordable Housing using Bamboo: A Community-driven Service Design Inquiry using Creative What-if Exercises
Affordable Housing (AH) remains a critical global issue, especially for economically weaker sections (EWS) of the developing countries like India. Non-affordability of typical building materials, make the EWS choose alternate materials like bamboo, which is traditionally-used in the tropics for being sustainable and affordable. However, challenges related to standardisation and societal perception hinder its mainstreaming. This warrants a holistic design approach like Service Design (SD), connecting different stakeholders involved with AH using bamboo, at the system level. While SD has wide application across different sectors, its role in building industry, remains relatively underexplored. Subsequently, four community-driven Indian initiatives are studied to understand their system diagrams and business model canvases. This is followed by role-changing What-if exercises to envision what could possibly be the SD approach if each of these four businesses attempted to address the issues of AH by bamboo. These role changing exercises lead to learnings that are used as a design response to identify parameters of a SD framework for AH using bamboo.