This thesis explores how architectural knowledge contributes to New Product Development (NPD) in the Swedish timber building industry and how the architect's role is affected as design moves beyond the architectural office and into long-term industrial development processes. The research draws on five applied research projects conducted between 2013 and 2026, focusing on the development process of prefabricated timber façade systems for new construction, renovation, reuse, and adaptation to architectural contexts.

The starting point was a perceived gap between architectural practice and product development in the timber building industry. This gap has become increasingly important as the construction sector faces growing demands for circularity, digitalization, resource efficiency, renovation, and industrialization. While architects are often associated with shaping a building’s form and early design phases, engineers, manufacturers, and production specialists typically drive building-system development. At the same time, growing demands for circularity, digitalization, resource efficiency, and adaptability to architectural context for prefabricated timber building systems suggest new forms of collaboration across the value chain. This raises questions about what architectural knowledge can contribute to NPD processes. To discuss this, the research adopts a Research-through-Design approach, combining co-design, prototyping, workshops, interviews, digital tool development, and full-scale testing. As an architect and researcher embedded in the projects, I tracked how ideas, materials, digital models, prototypes, Design Criteria, and façade systems evolved over time and shaped collaboration among architects, manufacturers, engineers, researchers, property owners, and material suppliers. A central finding is that architectural knowledge contributes to NPD not primarily through form-giving, but through its capacity to connect and negotiate aesthetic, material, technical, contextual, and circular concerns. Architectural knowledge further contributed by framing, visualizing, materializing, and coordinating design intentions across organizational and disciplinary boundaries, enabling the development of prefabricated façade systems capable of accommodating technical requirements, architectural variation, contextual adaptation, and future reuse. Across the five applied research projects, boundary objects became crucial for this process. Boundary objects such as Design Criteria, prototypes, material samples, digital models, workflows, and façade systems enabled different forms of knowledge to meet, be challenged, and gradually stabilize into shared decisions and façade systems. Rather than operating as passive representations, these boundary objects actively shaped discussions, exposed conflicts, supported learning, and enabled collaboration across disciplinary boundaries. Prototyping played a particularly important role by making assumptions visible, allowing architectural intentions to be tested against material, technical, and manufacturing constraints, and supporting negotiation between different actors throughout the development process.

The findings further suggest that digital tools and workflows are not neutral instruments. They influence what knowledge becomes visible, what discussions become possible, and what architectural intentions survive as projects move towards manufacturing and implementation. Similarly, circularity became effective when it was embedded in systems, materials, joints, workflows, and future use scenarios. Architectural knowledge contributed to the development of façade systems designed not only for immediate implementation but also for adaptation, renovation, reuse, and future transformation. Across projects, architectural knowledge informed design criteria, workflows, prototypes, digital tools, and collaborative frameworks by translating architectural intentions into industrial practice. The boundary objects functioned as both development outcomes and vehicles for knowledge generation and exchange. The façade systems and prototypes represent materialized negotiations between architectural intentions, material behavior, manufacturing requirements, digital processes, and circular ambitions. The façade systems, rather than being understood as fixed products, function as boundary objects, an adaptable framework together with the other boundary objects, supporting design variation, contextual adaptation, renovation, and future transformation.

Taken together, the findings suggest a repositioning of architectural agency within NPD in the timber building industry.  The architect's role expands from form-giver to system developer, mediator, facilitator, and curator of socio-material relations, and contributor to long-term industrial innovation. Architectural influence depends not only on what architects know, but on how that knowledge becomes embedded in boundary objects, systems, materials, and collaborative processes. The findings indicate that architects contribute not only by coordinating multiple forms of expertise, but also by envisioning possibilities, framing future use scenarios, and translating abstract architectural knowledge into material and operational realities. The thesis argues that these capacities are increasingly important as the timber building industry moves towards more circular, digitalized, and industrialized forms of development.