Within the discipline of industrial design engineering “dfx” is a common abbreviation for “design for x”, in which the “x” refers to several goals like sustainability (dfs), assembly (dfa), disabled (dfd), etcetera. As more industrial design engineers are employed within the Faculty for Architecture in Delft, especially at the chair for Product Development, the frames of thinking of industrial ...

This paper describes three case studies of dynamic simulation in preparation for the low carbon retrofit practice, namely, a pre-1919 terrace house, and a 1970s and a 2000s semi-detached house. The houses are located in Wales, UK. Each case study examines its current performance, assesses the effectiveness of different retrofit strategies, and evaluates the best group of options available. Retr...

The ‘wind-rain’ house has a courtyard with glazed roof, which allows more direct sunlight to come into indoor spaces during the winter. The glazed roof can be partially opened or closed and automatically controlled to provide natural ventilation in order to adjust for indoor thermal conditions and the roof area can be shaded by reflective insulation materials during the summer. Two field studie...

Developing smart house systems has been a great challenge for researchers and engineers in this area because of the high cost of implementation and evaluation process of these systems, while being very time consuming. Testing a designed smart house before actually building it is considered as an obstacle towards an efficient smart house project. This is because of the variety of sensors, home a...

Often times in film, houses have been categorized as a part of the set design or production design. They are purposefully furnished and decorated according to the director’s vision. Filmmakers, scholars, and critics recognize the importance of the setting and its decorations. However, let us consider the possibility that a house is more than the set design; it is a character. The characterizati...