Ever since we serendipitously bumped into the extraordinary MatterMachine team at the Makertorium Exhibition in Te Papa during April 2013, we have been working in collaboration with them to bring a platform for open, customisable manufacturing to the world.

MatterMachine have been building a product customisation toolkit that works in your web browser. It enables anyone to tailor designs such as desks, stools and eventually whole houses to your individual needs and desires, and send your designs direct to local makers!

It works on a network of functions and parameters (similar to Rhino's Grasshopper plugin) that can be individually adjusted to customise aspects such as the height, length, shape and material thickness of the thing you are making. Already MatterMachine have created an excellent demonstration with the Open Desk furniture design, which you can play with here, and watch the intro video here.

For us at WikiHouse/NZ, the MatterMachine app allows anyone in the WikiHouse community to share and collaborate on designs from around the globe, and accelerate the development of the open-source construction system.

Crucially however, we see MatterMachine the ideal software platform to empower people to turn their house design dreams into fabricated reality - ready to assemble. There is still a way to go before this is all possible, but it is the key bottlenecks in lowering the barriers to entry and making it easier to Self-Build homes in communities around New Zealand, and across the globe.

We encourage everyone to have a look and play around on this game-changing software. Soon you may be designing your own high-performance home with it...

MatterMachine interface demonstrating a prototype WIkiHouse design configurator.