DESIGN PROCESS AT PUBLIC COMPANIES DEALING WITH HOUSING PRODUCTION: EVALUATION BY MEANS OF A CASE STUDY

This paper evaluates the housing design process, at public companies, and suggests ways to improve it. The evaluation results come from a case study developed at CDHU, a very large Brazilian company dealing with housing building production. Interviews with designers, accesses to the company rules and to its home pages provide the basis for understanding the design process. The authors focused on a specific housing program, named “Empreitada Global” or EG, adopted at 76% 4 of the company production during the last seven years. Understanding the design process flow was considered to be the first step to attain the goal of this research. After its description, an analysis over the design process is conducted and suggestions are made in order to help avoid detected problems. All the actions proposed are discussed in terms of advantages and difficulties expected on the action implementation.