Behavioural Production

Book excerpt: Autonomous manufacturing and cyber-physical systems are key enabling technologies of the Fourth Industrial Revolution (IR4) which are currently being incorporated into the building design and construction industries. These emerging IR4 technologies have the potential to effectively improve construction affordability and productivity, address current and future building demand, and reduce the environmental impact of the built environment. However, design approaches that make use of IR4 technologies are still relatively unexplored. While automation, such as mass production, promotes standardised design solutions, design thinking that embraces varying degrees of autonomy can lead to unique and considered approaches to design on an industrial scale. Behavioural Production: Semi-Autonomous Approaches to Architectural Design, Robotic Fabrication and Collective Robotic Construction explores design operating through the orchestration of spatiotemporal events. A multi-agent behaviour-based approach to computation is employed in architectural design and extended to individual and swarm-based robotic methods for additive manufacturing. Behavioural Production seeks to expand our capacity to engage with the world at large through varying degrees of autonomy. In an industrialised world where traditional craftsmanship has been marginalised and cannot scale to meet societal needs, this book speculates a means to bring scalable forms of creativity into the act of making. This is explored through the use of materials, generative algorithms, computer vision, machine learning, and robot systems as active agents in design conception and realisation. The book presents a collection of ideas, projects, and methods developed in the author’s design practices and research labs in the fields of architecture and computer science. This body of work demonstrates that engaging with semi-autonomous processes does not diminish authorship, but rather expands it into new forms of design agency that seamlessly integrate with emerging manufacturing and construction technologies whilst authoring distinctive design character.