Smart Packing: An Integrated Digital Framework for Design, Optimisation, and Fabrication Using Under-Utilised Timber

Confirmation seminar presented by Lingju Wu

The built environment is a major driver of material consumption and waste, motivating a shift toward circular construction strategies that integrate material efficiency with structural performance. Timber offers significant sustainability benefits, yet large volumes of out-of-grade and waste timber remain under-utilised due to irregular geometry, defects, and uncertain properties. Existing reuse workflows typically separate material sensing, design, and optimisation, limiting their applicability to real-world timber reuse. This research proposes an integrated computational optimisation framework that embeds material-specific information directly into the design logic. By segmenting and recombining irregular timber stock, the framework enables performance-driven structural reuse, supported by packing-informed optimisation, material sensing, and human–robot collaborative fabrication.