SCALABLE DISRUPTORS

Cli­mate change, CO2 emis­sions and re­source scarc­i­ty – with the recog­ni­tion of the An­thro­pocene, it is evi­dent that the build­ing sec­tor must un­der­go a pro­found trans­for­ma­tion. As a re­sult, re­search has em­barked on a quest to find re­al dis­rup­tors to cur­rent build­ing tech­nolo­gies. In this quest for change, in­cre­men­tal im­prove­ments to ex­ist­ing sys­tems are no longer suf­fi­cient. What is need­ed are high­ly spec­ula­tive, high-po­ten­tial ap­proach­es that ac­cept and ac­knowl­edge fail­ure as a learn­ing pro­cess and in­te­gral de­vel­op­ment strat­e­gy. Be­yond the re­port­ing of our suc­cess­es, the in­sights and knowl­edge gained from aber­ra­tions can hold enor­mous de­vel­op­ment po­ten­tial.

Build­ing with less ma­te­rial and im­pact is an es­sen­tial part of any de­sign de­ci­sion, as man-made cli­mate change and re­source scarc­i­ty are un­de­ni­able. Two cur­rent trends are at­tempt­ing to pro­vide an an­sw­er: build­ing with re­ne­w­able re­sources and reus­ing ex­ist­ing build­ing com­po­nents. While tim­ber as a re­ne­w­able ma­te­rial is al­ready ex­pe­ri­enc­ing a sig­ni­f­i­cant in­dus­trial push, and clay is fol­low­ing suit, new bio-build­ing ma­te­rials and pro­cess­es are still in the lab­o­ra­to­ry. Ad­vanced mod­elling, si­m­u­la­tion and ma­chine learn­ing, aug­ment­ed re­al­i­ty and robotics are key tech­nolo­gies for in­dus­trial­iz­ing th­ese nov­el con­struc­tion pro­cess­es. While some ex­per­i­ments have shown po­ten­tial for scal­able so­lu­tions, others have de­mon­s­trat­ed vi­su­al ap­peal but in­ad­e­qua­cy as build­ing sys­tems.

Scal­ing, both in terms of the tran­si­tion from lab­o­ra­to­ry to in­dus­try and from in­dus­try to grass­roots, and from small robots to large robots, has sig­ni­f­i­cant im­pli­ca­tions across dif­fer­ent do­mains. It re­quires in­te­gra­tion not on­ly in terms of prac­tice and tech­nol­o­gy, but al­so with com­mu­ni­ties and in­di­vi­d­u­als. In ad­di­tion, the con­cept of scal­ing rais­es ques­tions about how cir­cu­lar de­sign chal­lenges tra­di­tio­n­al no­tions of re­source avai­l­a­bil­i­ty, so­cio eco­log­i­cal net­works and ecosys­tem ser­vices, es­pe­cial­ly as we scale up. Re­cent ad­vances in com­pu­ta­tio­n­al meth­ods in Ar­chi­tec­ture, En­gi­neer­ing and Con­struc­tion (AEC) have the po­ten­tial to con­tribute sig­ni­f­i­cant­ly to the de­sign for dis­as­sem­b­ly and scal­a­bil­i­ty of build­ing ma­te­rial reuse. Con­tri­bu­tions will ex­em­pli­fy how we can mod­el per­for­mance-based de­sign, trans­for­ma­tion and growth pro­cess­es to mea­sure and eval­u­ate out­comes.