Thesis Structure Overview

This page is a short orientation to the shape of the thesis: what each part contributes and how the parts hand off to one another. It is a reading map, not a navigation index — for the clickable section list see the Table of Contents, and for the assembled prose open each chapter-root binder.

The thesis runs to twelve chapters in three movements: it states a problem (Chapters 1–2), builds the theory and method to address it (Chapters 3–4), designs and tests a coordinated suite of five artefacts (Chapters 5–9), and then demonstrates, evaluates, and reflects on the whole (Chapters 10–12). The central problem is adaptation intractability: across a dwelling’s long life a local change — a renovation, a re-certification, a clause update — tends not to stay local but to force global re-checking of every drawing, schedule, and certificate that holds the home together. The thesis’s name for the integrative response is representational governance: the disciplined upkeep of meaning, boundaries, and permissible transformations so that a local change stays local.

Front Matter

The front matter carries the Title Page, Abstract, Statement of Originality, Acknowledgements, the Table of Contents, the List of Figures and List of Tables, the List of Abbreviations, the Glossary, and a short Writing Philosophy statement. A single-page Background Context orients the reader to the ageing, disability, and housing setting before the argument begins.

Problem and Foundations (Chapters 1–4)

• Chapter 1 — Introduction states the research problem, gap, aim, and questions, names the contributions, and fixes the scope. Housing for ability-diverse households must change over a building’s life, yet most adaptation is constrained as much by a dwelling’s representation as by its fabric.
• Chapter 2 — Literature Review and Theoretical Framework establishes housing need as a dynamic person–environment fit, shows why misfit persists in existing stock, and develops bounded optionality and modularity into the representational-governance problem class the thesis addresses.
• Chapter 3 — Theory: Modularity and Complexity turns that problem class into a design theory, drawing complexity and modularity theory (Simon, Parnas, Baldwin and Clark) and Open Building into a single design-theory contract with five testable propositions (P1–P5).
• Chapter 4 — Methodology sets the Design Science Research paradigm, the design cycles and data pipeline, and the evaluation contract — questions, measures, thresholds, and adjudication — that every artefact chapter is held to. The corpus is treated as a census, which fixes the maths-and-statistics ceiling for the evidence that follows.

The Artefact Suite (Chapters 5–9)

The five artefacts instantiate one architecture — a small, fixed governed kernel around which life-cycle variation is absorbed at a governed instance library — and each chapter designs, builds, and evaluates one artefact before handing a contract to the next.

• Chapter 5 — A Queryable Schema for Accessibility Standards diagnoses the ambiguity and fragmentation of accessibility standards and designs a five-layer schema that renders regulatory prose queryable, using Specialist Disability Accommodation as the proving ground.
• Chapter 6 — A Governed Kernel Architecture for Housing specifies the governed kernel itself: nine functional module types over a shared vocabulary, their constituent elements, interaction rules, and a validated module library.
• Chapter 7 — A Formal Notation for Floor Plans gives the modules a formal notation — RecPol as the discrete-grid formal core and PlaniSyn as the applied grammar — that can be written and read back without loss of meaning.
• Chapter 8 — Evidence from a Census of Australian Floor Plans grounds the architecture in a sealed corpus of Australian floor plans, supplying dimensional, occurrence, topological, and configurational evidence for the module taxonomy and its couplings.
• Chapter 9 — Generating Documented Dwelling Variants closes the loop with a procedural-generation pipeline and pre-vetted library that produce governed dwelling variants together with their documentation.

Demonstration and Synthesis (Chapters 10–12)

• Chapter 10 — Demonstration and Evaluation runs the decisive test: one dwelling branches at a single fork — ageing in place, or a higher-support refurbishment with a secondary dwelling — and the trajectory is evaluated for standards interpretability, modular fit, and workflow efficiency.
• Chapter 11 — Discussion synthesises the contributions, draws out the theoretical and practical implications, formalises the mid-range technological rules, and states the limitations.
• Chapter 12 — Conclusion summarises the thesis and its contributions, sets out recommendations for each audience, and closes.

Appendices

The Appendices hold two kinds of material: Type A data and materials (the appendix data index — schemas, registers, traceability matrices, corpus integrity metrics, and the Chapter 5 results-and-data package) and Type B supplementary context essays (the supplementary index). They carry the full evidentiary and reproducibility apparatus that the chapters reference but do not reproduce in the running prose.