Project Mushahuru (Big House) looks to provide smart sustainable housing design services across the developing world through a client side home design platform, that understands the environment and building regulations.

Project Details

There is a large brain drain across developing nations creating a critical intellectual shortage, in Zimbabwe where i come from, the entire country has less that 100 registered architecture firms! After the first initial shock, a quick search and one realizes that it is a widespread problem across developing countries. Our project recognizes this problem and sees an opportunity to make sure that our solution provides home designs that have sustainable design principles inherently embedded in them. Housing affects the environment in energy consumption, waste management, local ecology preservation and more. In response to this, we are developing a home design platform (an e-commerce service for residential design) which allows individuals to customize their home design for a fixed fee at a fraction of the cost of the traditional architectural service. The idea started back in 2015 when we were university students and we have been working tirelessly to acquire the skills and knowledge to do it correctly. We intent to first launch in Zimbabwe and neighboring Zambia, then adapt our solution as we grow across the developing countries. Whilst the idea is grounded in solving housing in developing nation, there is no reason why it cannot be applied to developed countries as well

Competive Advantage

Our project is unique in that the home solutions adapt themselves in accordance to environment, building regulation and aesthetic appeal which is a truly unique solution made possible by leveraging parametric programming design thinking. These aspects are broken down as follows 1. Context aware, our solution is designed to understand geographical context such as site orientation for natural ventilation and optimized heat gain/lost 2. Regulation Understanding: It is design to understand local and regional regulations such as building offsets, height restrictions, material restriction and specifications 3. Design Flexibility: Users can change the appearance of their homes through changing finished and adaptive layouts and get dynamic build cost feedback