When a Research Programme Ends, What Remains?

Over more than a decade, the NCCR Digital Fabrication has turned a growing field into a recognised discipline. But behind the automated processes and impressive structures, another story has been unfolding. Senior Researcher Kim Nørgaard Helmersen and his colleagues at ETH Zürich have been looking into exactly that.

An example of the inter- and transdisciplinary approaches applied at NCCR DFAB is serious game design through an iterative, participatory process. Photo by Sebastian Wagner

With the NCCR DFAB, the SNSF brought together dispersed actors, technologies, and projects over many years. Looking back, how did the programme turn previously siloed research disciplines into a recognisable and coherent research field?

What the NCCR DFAB did was not only fund research, but bring together people and projects from multiple disciplines: architecture, robotics, materials science, engineering, construction management, and work and organizational psychology — over more than a decade. Slowly, researchers from these different backgrounds started forming a community with a shared way of thinking and a common language.

This is what institutionalisation means: not just producing knowledge, but creating a shared understanding of what counts as relevant knowledge. Digital fabrication is now a stable, communicable field that both academia and industry can engage with. That was not always the case.

The research centre gave researchers the freedom to explore interdisciplinary projects and questions that would have been difficult otherwise within their home institutions. In Germany, Austria, and Switzerland, research education tends to be organised top-down, around departments led by senior professors. The NCCR shaped a different kind of space, where researchers could connect across fields and build on each other's work and therefore gained access to a broader community.

The NCCR has grown to include social scientists alongside engineers and architects. How does adding new perspectives change a field, and where do you see digital fabrication heading?

Every time a new perspective enters the field, it changes it. When the NCCR DFAB began including researchers from the social sciences, it wasn't just adding another discipline to the mix. It was asking a bigger question: what does digital fabrication actually do to the people and organisations involved? Some argue that truly transformative innovation, the kind that reshapes industries or societies, requires looking at the full picture. Not just the technology, but also the people using it, the economic conditions around it, and its environmental impact. The NCCR DFAB has been moving in that direction. But this also raises a deeper question: how broad do you want the field to be? Every new perspective brings new value, but it also brings new complexity. Researchers within the NCCR carry responsibilities in two directions at once: toward their home institution and toward the wider network. Balancing both is not always straightforward. The open question for digital fabrication is not just where the technology is heading. It is what kind of field it wants to become.

The workshop "Take Nothing For Granted: Communicating with Each Other Across Disciplines and Cultures" approached inter- and transdisciplinarity notions during the Parity Talks.Photo by NCCR DFAB

Can you please describe a scenario within the NCCR DFAB which showcases the breadth of the field?

The DFAB House offers a compelling illustration of the breath of the field. On the surface, it is a showcase of technological invention: robotic fabrication processes, novel material systems, and optimized structural geometries. But a social network analysis of the DFAB House additionally showed that transitioning from conventional construction to digital fabrication generates new collaboration forms and roles, and entirely new job profiles. The project thus became simultaneously about technology, building design, work design, organization, and the economics of construction.

But recognising the full breadth of the field is only the first step. The DFAB House showed what is possible when different disciplines come together. It also raised a practical question: when should you bring in which people? Getting an economist, or a work designer involved late can lead to important questions being asked only after key decisions have already been made. Also, securing the necessary building permit is important when aiming to scale from demonstrator projects for transfer, adding a law perspective to the interdisciplinarity.

What is the most common innovation narrative within the NCCR DFAB and why? Why did it prove so powerful?

Across a large number of NCCR DFAB publications, the most common innovation narrative has been that of technological invention — emphasising technical novelty and performance improvement. This narrative is powerful because it provides clear, measurable contributions: new materials, workflows, or systems. It also aligns well with the expectations of funding bodies and the disciplines that have dominated the collaborations.

How is DFAB perceived in the Swiss AEC sector? What are images that people imagine when talking about DFAB?

Digital fabrication is typically associated with technology and automated construction processes. This is no coincidence. The way a field represents itself to the outside often reflects what it values most internally. This perception may overshadow the less visible transformations that are also part of DFAB: new coordination mechanisms, evolving skill profiles, and human-machine interactions. This has real consequences. When companies and industry partners adopt digital fabrication, they often focus on the technology itself — and are caught off guard by the organisational changes that come with it. The tools are just one part of the picture; how people work together around those tools matters just as much.

Beyond the Swiss context, how has NCCR DFAB shaped the broader academic discourse?

The NCCR DFAB has become a reference point in the discourse on digital fabrication, beyond Switzerland. Through its scale, duration, and output, the NCCR has not only contributed knowledge but shaped how the emerging field defines what counts as innovative construction, and how research contributions and narratives are legitimised and evaluated. The center hasn't just influenced digital fabrication from the outside. It has helped build the field from within — shaping the questions researchers ask, and what kind of answers are taken seriously.

Towards the later phases of the NCCR DFAB, social science perspectives on work, organisation, and construction management began to enter the picture. What drove that shift, and what does it mean for how we understand digital fabrication?

The gradual shift from understanding digital fabrication as design, implementation, and use of technical tools toward understanding it as a sociotechnical transformation is, in my view, part of the process of such an emerging field. As technologies develop and are introduced into real-world contexts, their social dimensions surface — through the challenges they encounter and the impacts they produce. Digital fabrication is not standalone technology but, potentially, systemic innovation, requiring alignment across technical and social domains. When and how precisely to tie in social and technical agencies in the technology development processes, however, could be further explored.

What would it take to fully integrate technical and social perspectives into a shared sociotechnical understanding of digital construction?

I think this requires a combination of radically interdisciplinary partnerships from early phases of technology development along with a greater alignment among involved stakeholders regarding perception of sociotechnology. I recently came across a paper by Bailey et al. (2022) that presents a relational perspective on emerging technologies. Rather than understanding technology as simply a tool or a collection of machines, the paper argues that emerging technology is about relationships — constantly shifting connections between people, machines, and everything involved in making something work. I think this definition is radical enough to genuinely overcome an assumption that persists at times even in sociotechnical approaches, treating the human side as secondary. This framing also helps clarify what augmentation really means, and how technology design can be optimized through, for example, thoughtful work design.