Publication
Full robotic automation in construction and digital fabrication has gained significant momentum in the last 20 years. Yet, although effective, these technologies demand considerable capital investment, highly qualified operators, and are often tailored to specific tasks, making their deployment brittle in unstructured environments and over changing workflows. Although holding great promises for the future digitalization of the Architecture Engineering and Construction (AEC) industry, they might not represent the most rapid and accessible solution for small and local construction companies using bio-sourced materials such as timber. More recently, a set of new technologies reunited under the term of Extended Reality (XR) offers new alternatives in advanced manufacturing by situating the human workers at the very core of the digital implementation. XR has lately paved the way for more hybrid formats in which human dexterity, flexibility, cognitivity, and machine computation are coupled to deliver artifacts formerly produced by highly sophisticated robotic systems. Strong from previous developments mainly in augmented additive tasks, this work will focus on contemporary subtractive wood-working operations and integrating intelligent, ordinary manual tools in augmented frameworks for modern carpentry techniques. Context and tool-aware features, procedurally generated fabrication instructions, and the interface will be investigated to propose an augmented framework to aid unskilled operators in woodworking tasks at different building scales. Finally, the last part draws conclusions on the impacts and gauges the political footprint of the developed augmented workflow for designers, user-builders, and society at large. At the age of the fifth industrial revolution, this research proposes an alternative to fully automated manufacturing by reintroducing humans in a more distributed and socially sustainable digital fabrication model for timber construction.