The practice of design-build programs in remote areas in Taiwan

Under the influence of open-source culture, more and more non-professionals in the Asian-Pacific have begun to engage in activities like space reformation and design-build programs in recent years. This study analyzed the design-build programs promoted by the Association of Humanitarian Architecture (AHA) in Taiwan in the last four years using participant observation combined with secondary qualitative study and documentation. Then, we used the Collaborative Construction Model established in the previous research for comparison. The objective is to provide international organizations that are planning to enter Asia-Pacific for collaborative construction with a comprehensive recommendation. We found that the participants in the cases built explicit knowledge by reading the construction manuals, and then gained tacit knowledge from the local professionals and vocational-school teachers within subdivided learning and processing lines. The outcome demonstrated that such an approach allowed the participants with different backgrounds to work together effectively, and leveraged the smaller number of on-site professionals. By making good use of the natives’ tacit knowledge about their environment and local materials for collaborative construction, the participants experienced unexpected results and joys. It is common for Austronesian and the agricultural residents to have constructional skills as their second professional specialty. The use of local professionals’ tacit knowledge to guide the participants during construction led to the increase of self-confidence and honor in the local professionals. Besides, by combining traditional and modern constructional methods, instead of using the simple construction system utilized in urban areas, the dependency on industrialized products in remote areas could be reduced.