Design for Digital Fabrication: An Industry needs Analysis of Collaboration Platforms and Integrated Management Processes

Digital Fabrication is an emerging systemic innovation in the architecture, engineering and construction sector. However, the design process for digital fabrication lacks an integrated management process or digital collaboration platform. One reason may be a lack of industry stakeholder needs for such processes and platforms. To explore and facilitate such solution in the current practice, more information about the socio-technical industry requirements on such solution and its implementation to support and manage the BIM-based design process of digital fabrication is needed. To fill this gap, this work conducts an industry-needs analysis through content analysis and an online survey of 144 project stakeholders. Based on the results, this work identifies the most needed fabrication-related information, tools and roles at different design stages and the requirements of platform-based management, which include a common virtual environment for collaboration and a common data environment for data management. Moreover, this work shows that fabrication-related information and new roles are required by project stakeholders since the early design stage. The paper concludes by proposing a conceptual management framework for BIM-platform-based integration for design for digital fabrication in construction projects and identifying potential future research directions on the topic.