Evolutionary product development in working class housing

The well‐known economical product life cycle describes the typical pattern of a product’s turnover over time. Although it has become a central concept in product development and marketing, it has severe practical limitations. Probably one of the most important limitations is that it is a purely quantitative, descriptive relationship. It describes the most probable pattern over time in the relative growth and decline of the numbers sold of a successful product from its incubence until its extinction, but it does not say anything about the qualitative changes that the product undergoes during the different phases of its life cycle. In other words: it is impossible to explain the nature of a product’s renewal or the change in users’ demands and wishes during the different phases of the product life cycle. In this paper, the six phases of the product life cycle are complemented with a set of six qualitative ‘product phases’, which allows us to explain in what phases of the product life cycle functionality, design, pricing, production technology, promotion strategies and presentation, as well as the service level and the social behaviour of a company are important. It will be shown that, to a certain extent, the model can be used in architecture.