From Invention to Innovation: Socio-technical Processes in the Adoption of Digital Fabrication to Architecture, Engineering and Construction Praxis

Abstract

Digital fabrication (dfab) in Architecture, Engineering and Construction (AEC) is a growing research field producing an increasingly wide array of new technologies and methods. For more than two decades, ETH Zurich has been a pioneer in on research dfab in AEC. The National Centre of Competence Digital Fabrication in Architecture (NCCR Digital Fabrication), initiated at ETH Zurich in 2014, has become a leading research initiative in this evolving field and has demonstrated its research in the DFAB HOUSE project, a full-scale construction project implementing fundamentally new dfab methods. The potential impact of future dfab adoption on the AEC field is increasingly being recognized. As one of the world’s largest greenhouse gas emitters and consumer of primary resources, AEC faces vast ecological, economic, and societal challenges: the shift towards circular economy principles, the elimination of its substantial greenhouse gas emissions, and the need to provide a sustainable built environment. Dfab could become instrumental in addressing these challenges by reducing resource intensity and carbon emissions, increasing productivity, and improving working conditions in the construction industry. For these reasons, dfab is expected to increasingly complement or replace conventional construction methods. However, the AEC industry is struggling to adopt dfab, and there is a growing divide between the technology advances made in dfab research and the slow pace of its adoption to practical application. Despite this challenge, little research has looked at how dfab technologies can be integrated in the complex socio-technical processes of planning and constructing the built environment. While research continues to focus on solving the persistent technical challenges posed by construction-scale dfab, the socio-technical implications of adopting dfab for projects and stakeholders in AEC largely remained unexplored, and little research has explicitly focused on the challenges of organizing for the use of dfab in AEC. This doctoral thesis addresses this gap by studying full-scale dfab implementation projects and the stakeholder perspectives of technology inventors and dfab adopters to explain the underlying organizational and socio-technical principles that shape the process of dfab adoption in AEC praxis. Its first contribution presents an initial socio-technical description of a full-scale dfab project, thematizing the interaction between multiple dfab technologies on one project and reflecting on socio-technical learnings from dfab application at full scale. The second contribution establishes a socio-technical framework of dfab adoption in AEC projects, defining the main challenges to dfab adoption on a construction project and the implementation strategies and practices to overcome them. In addition, it presents three theoretical propositions on the relevance of demonstrator projects for dfab adoption. The third contribution presents an analytical framework of the effects of full-scale construction demonstrators on dfab adoption, describing three main effects of full-scale demonstrators on project organization, technology development, and innovation management. The fourth contribution is the DFC Evaluation Framework, a conceptual framework for assessing adoption potential of concrete dfab technologies and the corresponding DFC Scoreboard, a practical tool to systematically match technology potential and adopter needs. The findings of this thesis are intended to aid the adoption of dfab technologies in the practical realm and to help advance these novel technologies from invention by the NCCR Digital Fabrication and other research and industry initiatives to widespread innovation across the AEC industry.