Digital technologies have focused much attention on promoting industrial efficiencies, interoperability, and decentralisation, facilitating design possibilities via complex geometries whilst eliciting precision, and embedding supply chain sustainability practice and connectivity in the ubiquity of Smart agency. The Industry 4.0 proposition identifies the beneficial outcomes of technological advancement. Its basis and, by extension, the subset of digital design and fabrication, in part, is premised by an application in a market-driven competitive model approach. However, such underlying precepts may be equally applicable to invert the context to suit internal socio-economic conditions other than the economic activity to which they are directed but to which they may provide beneficial service. Less often referred to is how digital design and fabrication may be harnessed to benefit disadvantaged communities or those sectors where current or projected economic and industrial structures limit access to social equity. Leveraging the utilisation of digital technologies at play or developing within the construction industry, one may bypass some of the broader challenges of Industry 4.0 by including an opportunity focus application to addressing social disadvantage and social equity. This chapter makes a case for performance-based and circular architecture in bringing together digital design and digital fabrication tools to enhance social equity and self-agency. It demonstrates this potential in a connected response mechanism to the housing affordability debate, which does not always include young people, particularly those at risk of homelessness. The investigation lens is the parameters for temporary independent accommodation for at-risk youth to remain within an existing support unit or family. The process mode extends by integrating a self-capacity facility. In the Australian housing sector, the historical aspects of prefabrication, land subdivision, dependant units and self-build, still supported by regulatory regimes, resonate with the potential of digital design and fabrication tools. Opportunities arise in scalability and decentralisation, upstream embedment for performance enhancement and sustainable practice, portative flexible modularity, and transformation permutation. Self-capacity lies with personalisation via participatory design customisation and engagement with fabrication and assembly, serving as a training program to support employability and empowerment. By taking advantage of supply chain features of the Australian construction sector and technological advancement, one may look at the coeval opportunities that lie in applications that support social equity and inclusive responses to addressing real-world issues of social disadvantage.
