It is vital it is to radically rethink what is built, and how, to sustain our future. And one of the most imminent threats, and opportunities, for architecture is automation. While there is a need to increase automation in construction due to significant automation gaps, focussing on the potentials of science and technology alone is not the answer. Nor is an exuberance of form which has fallen into conflict with existing building practices, exacerbating existing disparities in building cultures, practices and experiences. Instead, what is needed is an intersectional approach to automation that places at its centre the design of, and vision for, collective resilience - across disciplines, but most importantly, across lived experiences and subjectivities.

Learning from the social visions common to the 1960s and 1970s, automation can be reframed as a design project. Automation as a design project enables the navigation of a terrain where scientific knowledge and the material production of technologies can be knotted into sociopolitical processes and imaginaries. When framed in this way, automation can become an arena through which issues such as ownership, distribution and cultures of automation in architectural production can be discussed. These are shared and global issues that transcend place, cultures and contexts.