Future of Construction Workshops

What does it mean to think and create with new technologies, rather than simply use them? That question will be addressed during the workshop sessions at the fourth edition of the Future of Construction Symposium, taking place at ETH Zurich, co-hosted by the NCCR DFAB and Design++. Ahead of the event, workshop leads Inés Ariza and Dominik Reisach explain why the most important challenge facing construction today isn't technical — it's imaginative.

Workshop setting in the RFL during the RobArch Conference in 2018.

Inés and Dominik, you are in charge of the workshops. What thread connects the workshops you selected, and what do you hope participants take away that they couldn't get from a lecture?

The workshops we selected don’t share a topic but a posture: a speculative one toward construction futures, with a hands-on approach that wouldn’t fit in a conference session. Participants should leave with something they have built, and with the unresolved questions that those discussions, objects, or prototypes open up. We put together a programme that connects tutors and participants across disciplines and application contexts, not to converge on answers but to find better questions.

What specific session or conversation at the symposium are you genuinely curious about?

We are at a moment when AI, extended reality, and robotics are beginning to converge and reshape what it means to design and build. But for us, the most interesting challenge isn’t technical, it’s imaginative: what do we actually want to build, and why, and for whom? The underlying question is what we are the most curious about: what does it mean to think, create, and speculate with these technologies rather than just use them? We hope the symposium opens space for exactly that conversation.

Robotic fabrication is still a niche in construction. What would it take for it to move from showcase projects to standard practice?

The conventional answer focuses on adoption at scale, a fragmented industry, and messy construction sites too difficult to navigate for machines. However, the more urgent question is what we would be scaling, and why. Automation in construction, whether through robotics, AI, or extended reality, can easily detach from the spatial and social questions that motivated it, becoming purely a problem of efficiency, cost, and profit. That’s the risk: scaling without vision. Having designers and architects actively shape construction futures isn’t incidental, it’s how the field avoids inheriting a future that was imagined somewhere else. We hope that the workshops provide a space for the community to contemplate and ideate the future of construction.

Inés Ariza is a NCCR DFAB postdoc researcher and R&D Project Lead at Gramazio Kohler Research & MESH. Dominik Reisach is a NCCR DFAB PhD researcher at Construction Heritage and Preservation and Digital Building Technologies.

Until the symposium begins in May, we will be regularly asking the organisers questions on topics surrounding Construction of Future/s. Those interviewed are each affiliated with either the NCCR DFAB or Design++. Find more information on the symposiums website.