The editorial
GhaffarianHoseini, A., Ghaffarianhoseini, AH., Rahimian, F., and Dawood, N. (2022). Guest editorial: Future construction: Design solutions and approaches. Smart and Sustainable Built Environment, 11(2), 177 to 180.
The theme
Future construction, in the sense of the special issue, is about how buildings will be designed and delivered as digital technology, sustainability requirements and new materials change the industry. Design solutions and approaches range from computational design and digital fabrication to off site manufacture, and from performance based design to new forms of collaboration between designers and builders.
As lead author, he set out how the papers in the issue addressed those questions and how they related to one another, the task that shapes how readers approach a special issue.
Context
He led the editorial with Amirhosein Ghaffarianhoseini, Farzad Pour Rahimian and Nashwan Dawood, the latter two then at Teesside University, a partnership that also produced the Construction Innovation special issue on digital twins in the same year and later the DFBI conference at TU Delft. Smart and Sustainable Built Environment is the Emerald journal most closely associated with CIB W116, the commission with which he later hosted SASBE 2024.
The special issue model
Special issues allow a journal to concentrate attention on an emerging theme, and they allow guest editors to shape a field’s agenda by deciding which questions deserve a focused collection. Leading the editorial for a special issue on future construction placed him among the scholars defining how design solutions and approaches for construction should be studied at a moment of rapid technological change.