Purpose
Off-Site Construction (OSC) has received much government and public attention during and after COVID. Building Information Modelling (BIM) is an initiative discussed widely to promote OSC implementation. Although many policy promotions have been published, there are many challenges to implementing BIM and OSC in real life and questions of whether they really offer value to healthcare design professionals. This research aims to investigate BIM and OSC to understand their commonalities and differences of challenges by collecting empirical evidence from China’s healthcare construction.

Design/methodology/approach
This exploratory research adopted a mixed method with a questionnaire survey and interviews. A total of 261 questionnaires were received (with 183 valid), followed by 31 semi-structured interviews.

Findings
This research reveals that although both OSC and BIM face similar adoption challenges and suspicious attitudes in real-life projects, their challenges’ connotations and reasons are different. OSC faces scepticism for its customisation costs and technical constraints, while BIM is seen as limited in utility and complex to integrate. Highlighting these as socio-technical challenges, the research advocates for an integrated framework to effectively implement OSC and BIM, addressing both technical and collaborative needs in healthcare construction.

Originality/value
This research examines OSC and BIM within the context of healthcare construction, a focus that is relatively underexplored. The research provides a juxtaposition of the perceived and practical challenges of adopting these technologies, revealing a gap between the industry’s expectations and the current capabilities of OSC and BIM, thereby contributing to the development of modern methods of design in healthcare.

Digital Fabrication (DFAB) faces challenges in project delivery due to various barriers, such as its complex technical processes and unclear benefits. However, there is no specific research on project delivery methods for DFAB. This study conducts a comparative case study to understand the delivery of projects with varying degrees of DFAB implementation. Modularity theory is used as a lens to explore project delivery methods. This study tentatively proposes strategies for establishing potential project delivery methods for DFAB. The research identifies three key characteristics: 1) the adoption of modular products and processes, 2) the adoption of an integral type of project delivery method, and 3) the significant role of informal relationships in project delivery. The study finds that misalignment relationships at the product, process, and supply chain levels, namely the combination of modular products and processes with integral supply chains, have fostered flexibility and coordination in DFAB project delivery. Theoretically, this study discusses the symbiosis and interrelationship between modularity and integration within the context of project delivery. Practitioners can build on these strategies to establish project delivery methods.

Modularity is an approach to simplify systems and reduce complexity. However, existing research suggests that a mono-dimensional modularity strategy, focusing solely on one dimension, such as product, process, or organization, might not fully achieve these goals in design activities. This research investigates how combining strategies from various dimensions of modularity can reduce the complexity of large-scale engineering design. The Huoshenshan Hospital, a 1,000-bed hospital designed and built in 10 days, provided an extreme case study of the first emergency hospital to address COVID-19. The research identified 10 different aspects, termed ‘proximities’, which relate to how people perceive the four dimensions of modularity, specifically across organization–process–product–supply-chain dimensions. Additionally, it identified three types of reinforcement relationships aimed at diminishing complexity in design activities: modular alignment (i.e., synchronized alignment and asynchronous alignment), modular complementarity (i.e., subtraction complement and addition complement), and modular incentive relationships. This research highlights that these three types of reinforcement relationships between different dimensions of modularity can reduce complexity, allowing subsystems to support the system in working as a whole.

This study aims to use modularity to impact various facets of Design for Manufacture and Assembly (DfMA) and explore the relationship between product modularity, process modularity, and DfMA within the context of Offsite Construction (OSC). The study fills this gap through an exploratory single case study by identifying perceptual measures of these three concepts. The study shows the alignment between multi-dimensionality of modularity, such as product modularity and process modularity, enhances the capability of DfMA. From a modularity perspective, the reconfiguration of abstraction, information hiding, and interface is an essential strategy to change the traditional design process. This reconfiguration is to adapt to the new scenarios brought by OSC and digital fabrication technologies and the new design tasks associated with these scenarios. This study has theoretical implications for the modular approach to DfMA and practical implications for those who expect digital fabrication techniques in offsite construction.

Startups seeking scale often turn to venture capital (VC) for funding, gaining financial support, industry connections, and insights in exchange for equity. Transitioning from initial markets to mergers, acquisitions, IPOs, SPACs, or buyouts, startups face the dual potential for immense success or failure, a hallmark of the high-risk startup ecosystem. The construction industry, especially in the realm of technology startups like SaaS, is witnessing this trend. Unlike software-centric firms, construction robotics startups grapple with challenges posed by the need for physical, custom products, demand volatility, and lengthy development cycles. Venture capital funding is crucial for these 'deep tech' ventures. Still, it introduces the principal-agent issue, where aligning the entrepreneur's actions with the VC's interests is complicated by information asymmetry. VCs counter this through high-powered incentives, controlling rights, and staged investments. Despite the critical nature of this topic, academic research on VC impacts on hardware startups in the architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC) sector is sparse. Our research aims to fill this gap. We conducted 127 semi-structured and open-ended interviews with 95 individuals across Europe, North America, and other regions in 2022 and 2023. The resulting data, comprising over 90 hours of interviews and field notes, was analyzed using abductive thematic analysis, categorizing 2998 data segments into nine categories within three major themes. This analysis revealed five dimensions of VC's influence on construction robotics startups, highlighting misalignments and dynamic interactions. In preparation for journal publication, this research complements a parallel, data-centric quantitative study, enriching our understanding of this complex subject. Preprints of this research may be available upon request.

Prefabricated construction (PC) is an increasingly popular construction approach that offers numerous benefits, including greater efficiency, improved safety, and reduced material waste. However, this approach also introduces a new set of quality risks due to the complex process of off-site prefabrication, transportation, and on-site assembly. Currently, quality management (QM) in PC is mainly conducted through manual efforts that rely on human experience and established standards. This approach can be both inefficient and susceptible to human bias, which can lead to quality issues. To address these concerns, this study proposes a knowledge engineering-based framework that utilizes knowledge modeling and reasoning to enable intelligent QM. The framework consists of four layers: data acquisition, knowledge generation, knowledge storage, and value-added application. The proposed framework was applied to a case scenario, and the results showed that the open information stored in the knowledge base can guide the quality control process, and vice versa, enabling the quality control process to promote the updating of the knowledge base.

The prevailing issue of low housing supply is caused in part by a lack of skilled construction workers. If unskilled residents were adequately equipped, they could potentially address this issue, expanding and adapting their homes without professional builders and designers. This research proposes the use of discrete components to build on unused community lands using augmented reality (AR) assisted assembly. Enfield, a low-density community in London, was chosen as the case study location. Modular components, pre-assembled off-site by robots, were designed to form a set of interlocking structures making them easy to install and dismantle. ARassisted construction integrates design and construction processes, helping to resolve sequencing and flow issues during assembly. A robotic simulator was used to visualise the robotic assembly process and an AR programming was used to guide self-builders with no building experience through assembly. An experiment was set up, where AR-assisted non-professionals use modular components to assemble a 1:2 scale pavilion model. This workflow could encourage individual and community-led building expansions and could be effective in reducing pressure on the construction industry and providing more housing.