Modular Infrastructure for Inclusive Housing

Ground-up Application of a Modular Framework to Improve Housing for Ability-Diverse Living

A thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy — Tran Thien Toan Ngo, Western Sydney University. Bibliographic detail on the Title Page.

ABSTRACT

Households whose abilities differ — with age, with disability, with the changing membership of a life-stage — make demands on their housing that shift across a building’s long life. Most will be housed by stock that already stands, so the binding question is how much change an existing dwelling can absorb. That capacity is limited, on our reading, as much by a dwelling’s representational infrastructure — its drawings, schedules, certificates, and the regulatory texts they answer to — as by its physical fabric: a change meant to stay local repeatedly forces global re-checking across every commitment that holds the dwelling together. Keeping a local change local — a problem of representational governance — is what this thesis treats as a design-science problem and answers with a modular architecture for the dwelling.

The response transposes two lineages onto housing. From the study of complex systems — Simon, Parnas, Baldwin and Clark — it takes the principle that change stays tractable when interdependence is bounded by stable interfaces that publish what others may rely on and hide what lies within; from Open Building, the layered dwelling whose long-life support carries a renewable short-life infill. Joining them yields the thesis’s central artefact, a Governed Kernel Architecture: a governed kernel — a small set of design rules, nine functional space-types over a stratified vocabulary of seven primitives and seven composites, a variant-inheritance rule, and explicit interface contracts — around which life-cycle variation is absorbed in a bounded governed instance library. The kernel is governed rather than frozen: fixed for any given configuration, yet revisable through a rule-bound, versioned path. The architecture is instantiated as a coordinated artefact suite: a design theory; a schema that renders regulatory prose queryable; the module system that houses the kernel; a planimetric notation that can be written and read back without loss of meaning; a generation-and-documentation pipeline; and an empirical substrate of 745 Australian floor plans. Specialist Disability Accommodation under Australia’s National Disability Insurance Scheme serves as the proving ground, not the subject, because it concentrates the difficulty into one auditable instrument.

The decisive test sits at a single fork: one four-bedroom dwelling branches two ways — the original occupants ageing in place, or a higher-support refurbishment with an attached secondary dwelling — and both, on our reading, are absorbed without the governed kernel moving. A representation that travels intact between actors, and one that confines the effects of a local change, appear well supported; governed variation under shared rules holds at moderate confidence within the single branch examined; faithful replay of authoring acts, and net benefit across a dwelling’s life, remain only partly established. Wider rater studies, further trajectories, other building stocks and regulatory regimes, and a production implementation would extend the warrant.

Keywords: modular architecture and design rules; governed kernel; housing adaptation; representational governance; Open Building; planimetric notation; design science research.

About this thesis

Ability-diverse households — whose abilities vary by disability, by age, or by life-stage — make demands of housing that evolve across the long life of their buildings, and most are housed by stock that already stands. The binding constraint is the absorption capacity of that existing fabric: how much change a dwelling already standing can take up as the needs of its occupants shift.

The thesis answers with a modular architecture for the dwelling, the Governed Kernel Architecture. Its central move is a governed kernel — stable but not immobile, revisable only through a rule-bound, versioned promotion path — built in two layers: a Generative Grammar of seven schematic primitives and seven elaborated composites related through ten relation operators, and a Modular Contract System of nine module-types with interaction rules and a variant-inheritance mechanism. Beneath the kernel, a governed instance library absorbs life-cycle change while the kernel stays fixed for any given configuration. This is modularity in Baldwin and Clark’s publish/hide sense, transposed to the dwelling and joined to Open Building’s long-life support and short-life infill. That architecture is the engine, and the five-artefact suite of Chapters 5–9 exists to encode, instantiate, validate, and operate it: a queryable schema for accessibility standards, the Governed Kernel Architecture that houses the kernel, a formal notation for floor plans, an empirical substrate from a census of 745 Australian floor plans, and a generator for documented dwelling variants. The architecture is tested on a single fork (Chapter 10): one 165-square-metre four-bedroom dwelling branches two ways — the original occupants ageing in place, or a higher-support SDA refurbishment with an attached secondary dwelling — and both are absorbed in the governed instance library while the governed kernel stays fixed. Specialist Disability Accommodation under Australia’s National Disability Insurance Scheme is the proving ground, not the subject: the architecture is general, and SDA supplies the evidence.

New readers should start with the Background Context for the social and policy setting, then the Thesis Structure Overview for a reading map of how the parts hand off to one another. The map below shows the twelve-chapter spine.

thesis_map — **Thesis map — the twelve-chapter spine in five phases** The thesis proceeds through twelve chapters in five phases: a goal phase (Chapters 1–2) establishing the problem and its warrants; a theory-and-method phase (Chapters 3–4); five artefact chapters (Chapters 5–9 — the standardisation schema, the Governed Kernel Architecture, the notation, the empirical substrate, and the generator); a demonstration-and-evaluation chapter (Chapter 10); and a value phase of discussion and conclusion (Chapters 11–12). Solid arrows follow the chapter sequence; the two dashed arrows mark conceptual dependencies that do not follow chapter numbering.

Front Matter

Orientation

Chapters

Problem and Foundations (Chapters 1–4) — the research problem and its warrants, then the theory and method that answer it.

The Artefact Suite (Chapters 5–9) — five artefacts that instantiate one architecture, each designed, built, and evaluated before handing a contract to the next.

Demonstration and Synthesis (Chapters 10–12) — the decisive test, then the discussion and conclusion that draw out its value.

Chapter 10: Demonstration and Evaluation
Chapter 11: Discussion
Chapter 12: Conclusion

Appendices