The Occasion
Six months after its founding event, the New Zealand Academy of Applied Research held its second international event on 8 December 2016 at the GTower Hotel, Kuala Lumpur. Four conferences ran together: Architecture, Landscape, Interior Design and Urban Planning (ALIU 2016); BIM, Digital Fabrication and Computational Simulation and Visualisation (BDC 2016); Civil, Mechanical Engineering and Construction Management (CMC 2016); and Sustainability, Green Buildings, Environmental Engineering and Renewable Energy (SGER 2016). The proceedings published 24 peer reviewed papers across 194 pages.
The edition was smaller than the founding event in Putrajaya, with four conferences in place of five, but it was more sharply defined. The founders consolidated architecture, landscape, interiors and planning into one conference, joined civil and mechanical engineering with construction management, and kept a dedicated conference for sustainability and green buildings. The fourth place went to an entirely new subject.
Curating the Digital Turn
Professor Ghaffarian chaired the event and, with the other co-founders, Professor Amirhosein Ghaffarianhoseini and Farnaz Sheikh, shaped its thematic structure, including the decision to add a dedicated conference on BIM and computational design. A chair’s most consequential power is the power to name the themes a community gathers around, and this was its first significant exercise in the series.
The Research Behind the Decision
The decision followed directly from the research Prof Ghaffarian was leading at the time. The review of BIM uptake, of which Prof Ghaffarian is lead author, setting out the benefits of BIM alongside the risks and challenges of implementing it, appeared in Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews in this period and has since been cited 1,266 times. In the same months Prof Ghaffarian led papers on a BIM readiness and implementation strategy for small and medium construction companies for the 33rd CIB W78 conference in Brisbane, a BIM execution framework for the BIM International Conference in São Paulo and Lisbon, and, for CONVR 2016 in Hong Kong three days after the Kuala Lumpur event, the integration of augmented reality with BIM for construction site coordination. Since 2015 Prof Ghaffarian had represented AUT on the national board of BIM Education New Zealand, and in 2016 contributed to the New Zealand case on supporting BIM adoption presented to the UK BIM Academic Forum. Adding BDC 2016 aligned the series he chaired with the international conversation he was helping to lead.
The digital programme had a longer history at AUT. Prof Ghaffarian first presented the integrated nD BIM and knowledge based building management concept at the New Zealand Built Environment Research Symposium in 2014, the year of the move to AUT, before its publication in leading journals. In December 2016 that concept was the foundation of a doctoral programme, and the conference on BIM and computational design gave the series a home for exactly this kind of research.
Ideas Put Before Peers
The event also carried Prof Ghaffarian’s own speculative work. At ALIU 2016 Prof Ghaffarian led a paper proposing robotic foldable houses for a half day urban lifestyle, an exploration of how intelligent, adaptable dwellings might answer the pressures of dense city living. It extended the line of thought in his earlier reviews of smart houses and anticipated the later public writing on co-living and co-working. At SGER 2016, a paper with Nicola Naismith and AUT colleagues examined productivity in the New Zealand construction industry, a theme that has remained central to the School’s research.
Other papers in the volume included a study of BIM based collaborative design studios, an assessment of site layout practices on construction projects in Nigeria, and research on public recreation space under urban intensification in Auckland. Together they show the series already doing what its founders intended: placing New Zealand questions beside those of Southeast Asia and Africa, in one forum and under one peer review.
Building the Next Generation
The December 2016 papers also reveal the research team Prof Ghaffarian was assembling at AUT. The robotic foldable houses paper was written with Tongrui Zhang, Dat Tien Doan and Attiq Ur Rehman, and the productivity study with Zhang and Doan among its authors. All three went on to complete doctorates under Prof Ghaffarian’s primary supervision: Doan in 2019 on enhancing Green Star certification through improved BIM uptake, Zhang in 2019 on integrating BIM with building management systems, and Rehman in 2022 on trust and governance for driverless technology.
For these candidates the series offered an early international audience, and for the series they provided a pipeline of rigorous applied research from New Zealand. The relationship illustrates a principle that runs through Prof Ghaffarian’s leadership: that conferences are instruments of capability building as much as dissemination. The supervision record that grew from this team now includes 21 completed doctorates and 153 completed Master’s research projects.
A Decade of Consequence
At the time, BIM adoption in New Zealand and Southeast Asia was still uneven, and computational design was largely confined to specialist practices and research groups. A decade later, digital construction, digital twins and artificial intelligence sit at the centre of the field and of Prof Ghaffarian’s own work. He has been an Associate Researcher of AUT’s Centre for AI Research since 2021, a member of the Artificial Intelligence Reference Group at the Office of the Prime Minister’s Chief Science Advisor since 2023, and sole academic advisor to the BIMinNZ National Committee since 2025. The digital strand is now one of the three pillars of the GDI series.
The thread from BDC 2016 to the present is visible in Prof Ghaffarian’s editorial work as well. With Farzad Pour Rahimian and Nashwan Dawood, and with Professor Amirhosein Ghaffarianhoseini, Prof Ghaffarian guest edited a special issue of Construction Innovation on enabling the development and implementation of digital twins, and the same question of how digital records can carry accountability through a building’s life informs his commentary on building consent reform. What was a specialist conference track in Kuala Lumpur in 2016 has become, a decade later, a question of national regulation and international scholarship.
The December 2016 event is where that strand first appeared in the conference lineage Prof Ghaffarian founded. The move to Kuala Lumpur widened the event’s reach as well, placing it in a regional hub with strong university and professional communities and better connections for international delegates, and the city hosted every NZAAR event that followed.