Life cycle thinking across education, digital tools, and companies.
Doktorand: Fabian Kastner
Zweitbetreuung: Prof. Dr. Guillaume Habert, Chair of Sustainable Construction, ETH Zurich
Transitioning to sustainable practices in the built environment demands long-term perspectives. Long-term perspectives may be operationalized through life cycle thinking (LCT). To this end, the scope of life cycle-oriented use cases has widened. However, although LCT offers a well-founded set of concepts, methods, and tools for various contexts, its operationalization concerning the built environment remains limited.
The future built environment is dependent on reflective professional practice. Although life cycle-oriented approaches have been documented for decades, this has been mostly limited to academic spheres. This gap between academia and practice might hinder advancing long-term thinking. Aiming to support the future broader deployment of long-term thinking, both domains, academia, and practices in the AECO sector are considered. This thesis examines selected processes in these two domains and adds a potential intermediary step in-between: digital mediation. In doing this, a focus is given to integrating LCT as a common rationale across the following contexts: architecture education, digital tools, and construction companies. The implications of integrating LCT within these contexts are examined using different feedback mechanisms: curriculum mapping, playtesting in transdisciplinary tool development, and companies’ trends in environmental impacts.
The findings present opportunities and limitations of operationalizing life cycle thinking as a common element across academia and practice. Potential future research toward anchoring long-term perspectives is discussed.