The standard way of building consists on average of 7000 parts and processes which in combination with the decrease in productivity within the construction sector limits the number of actors that can be involved. However, this leads to a housing shortage in many countries. The production of homes should be accessible, affordable and should offer a variety of housing solutions. In order to reach this the production chain of architecture must be rethought by considering design and production throughout the whole process. Modularity of discrete building blocks can be a way to reach efficient production processes as well as diverse housing solutions by means of combinatorial variations. This method has been used in pavilion and furniture designs, but only briefly for housing solutions, mostly the main references can be found in game design – such as Lego. The goal of this research is to devise a methodology to design a small set of stackable timber elements to form both a structure and the inner shells of a building that can be configured into versatile and affordable housing units using combinatorial design and compression-only structures (which is designed based on equilibrium). This leads to an accessible and open-ended building system that strives to be as simple as laying out a Lego structure.

The term AI has entered the creative industry in the last decades. Computer based design is now omnipresent in everyday life. Will AI take over the creative industry? Can they autonomously be creative? These are some of the headlines propagated by the mainstream media. This paper will unveil the human labor behind these computer generated designs by analyzing how they were publicized and how they were actually developed. Through the related case studies, it is possible to identify how much of the AI work is still human originated, and how a total automation is still not attained. However, the illusion created through media does suggest that generative models are capable of producing human-like text, art etc. If the human labor is fully substituted by a computer, then a new test will be necessary to verify the feasibility. The suggestion of a Collective test will be based on the study of how a human culture develops: through creativity and diversification. If a computer lacks human insights, will they still be able to create a new culture?