Swarm Build

A build using a large group of people working in parallel. People work in parallel on different modules, then assemble them rapidly into a finished product. Together with Digital Fabrication and Language Agnostic Instructionals - this allows for industrial productivity on a small scale. Such productivity is the basis of OSE's Extreme Manufacturing and Distributive Enterprise model.

Swarm builds use Extensive Scalability rather than Intensive Scalability as a means to build things faster with a large group of people. Intesively scaled builds do not allow as large a team to participate, while Extensively scaled builds allow for much better division of labor.

For example, the Seed Eco-Home was built using Extensive Scalability: a large number of small, panelized modules were built by about 12 teams in parallel. This allowed for the complete erection of the 1400 sf house in 5 days. For comparison, a typical house takes 6 months to build.

As another example, the CNC Torch Table v19.10 uses 5'x5' modules, designed such that additional modules can be added to the original to handle larger workpieces. As such, a 5'x10' table is possible (by adding a support under the Y axis for eliminating shaft bending), and so is a 5'x20' (by adding a stronger support to eliminate shaft bending, and so is a 10'x10' by adding support under the X and Y.