"Deconstruction" in physics was introduced by Nima Arkani-Hamed, Andy Cohen and Howard Georgi, and independently by Christopher T. Hill, Stefan Pokorski and Jing Wang.
Deconstruction is a lattice approximation to the real space of extra dimensions, while maintaining the full gauge symmetries and yields the low energy effective description of the physics.
This leads to a rationale for extensions of the Standard Model based upon product gauge groups,
Deconstruction is used in a supersymmetric context to address the hierarchy problem and model extra dimensions.
"Clock models," which have become popular in recent years in particle physics, are completely equivalent to deconstruction.