海角视频

In September 2022, we explored part two in the thorny topic of whether it鈥檚 ever OK to demolish a building in the 21st Century.

Nine months on from our initial panel discussion, we delved into the role of technology in understanding options and making decisions about the future of existing and new buildings. 

Our panel was chaired by Dr. Sarah Prichard, UK MD and Partner, 海角视频, the panel of industry experts included Marta Bouchard, AEC Sustainability Strategy, AutoDesk; Jules Barker, Global Director of Product, WiredScore; Simon Bird, Director, LOM; May Winfield, Global Director Commercial, Legal and Risk, 海角视频. Based on questions submitted by the audience, the conversation was dynamic and informative.

The panel were also joined by a visual scribe to conceptualise the ideas and discussions.

Watch the full recording

What did we learn?

Systems Thinking

Marta: If there was a quick fix we would have figured it out by now. Putting decarbonization into practice is a massive systems-thinking exercise, recognizing the interrelated effects of all these different systems. Having a systems-thinking mindset can make your head hurt sometimes, discussing all these integrated effects and downstream outcomes of one upstream decision. 

Early Decision-Making

Simon: I think there’s a bit of a gap in technology in the early-stage design decision-making. If we can build databases of lessons learned from projects, we鈥檒l learn from technology. Feeding those learnings back into the early feasibility, optioneering stages of projects will allow us to demonstrate a lot of benefits to clients and help us during those conversations at an early stage  

Working with vast amounts of data

May: I think one of the benefits of technology in this space is the ability to analyse and understand vast quantities of data. 海角视频 has various toolkits, digital twins, lifecycle assessments, ways of going in and assessing carbon use. We can assess if we change the use in a certain way, what impact it will have. We can run those figures through the computer and it figures out those decisions.

Marta: I think technology can be used to do a lot of the heavy lifting that otherwise would take the average person a lot of time to figure out. The opportunity to decarbonize comes with leveraging this technology to run the computations, analyse the simulations, anticipate risk, optimize our solutions and have this collaborative environment where we can calculate the trade-offs and quantify every aspect along the way.

Energy Costs of Technology

Jules: We need to acknowledge that technology we put it in buildings has an energy cost, including running costs, processing costs and environmental cost in terms of environmental degradation caused by digging the material up.

Having said that, the benefits just enormously outweigh the costs. I think it’s crucial we evangelize about the importance of technology being a fundamental building block to any solution. You can build a sustainable building without technology, my shed is an example, but that’s not going to function as a modern office. You need the technology for it to work.

Optimization and Flexibility

Jules: A building needs to provide real time information about what’s going on internally. For that, you need technology. You need to sensors, backwards connectivity to the data centres, et cetera. That in turn allows you to make better decisions day to day about what’s going on. You need technology to optimize, because once you’ve put the technology in the building, there are millions of different data points and no human can be on top of all of those things. You need intelligent buildings to optimize themselves and without all of that we won’t be able to decarbonize building operations.

Simon: Buildings should be designed to be as flexible as possible. This is where technology that’s embedded into the space allows us to monitor and change the space. The building we design is never the same on day one as it is on day 450. That change over time is something technology allows us to monitor and allows us to put flexible designs in place that allow that building to have a continued life.

Barriers to retrofit

Simon: We鈥檙e often dealing with existing buildings from all sorts of different areas where we’re having to do forensic detective work, to work out what was there in the first place. I look forward to technology being able to come in and help us out a little more in that space.

Marta: I鈥檝e definitely been in the trenches taking field measurements to then document in CAD or in BIM, and then to eventually get to the designing. There is no single source of technology that’s going to do that entire process right now, but we are working in the space to stitch all that together, because we know that painful workflow.

May: One of the problems is the lack of information about the buildings at present, and whilst you can do laser point surveys, and create a BIM model, it’s always going to be incomplete. Your decisions on how you retrofit are based on some assumptions, some guesswork and knowledge from previous experience. Part of the issue with this is that it鈥檚 very hard to achieve absolute certainty that the building will deliver the sustainability levels it promised.

Legacy for the Future

May: I would note the format of information as a key factor in how we move forward. If you have floppy disks, you have to find a computer that has a floppy disk drive to read this information. If you have an old version of something, you may not be able to open it. If you’re retrofitting, you should be thinking that you could retrofit again ten years from now. Can you guarantee that you’re going to be able to use your information? This is something that the industry really needs to think about because otherwise, we’re going to sleepwalk into that problem.

Jules: Let’s make sure that we have decent BIM models, digital twins, and that we have the data flows and the sensor arrays set up so we can actually understand what’s going on in the building. It鈥檚 also important that when someone makes changes, it gets documented. I think generally the reason these sorts of things break down is because no one has the processes in place to update changes. We should acknowledge that it is really difficult to use technology to deeply understand exactly what鈥檚 in a building. I鈥檓 enthusiastic about technology developing to fix that problem but let’s also help each other by making it so next time we come to this, we have the data.

Forward Thinking

Jules: This is something close to our hearts at WiredScore. One of the major functions of our products is to support our clients in setting the right strategy for their buildings, supporting them with their ESG+R agenda by helping them make sure they’re designing and installing the right tech and related infrastructure for the long term.

Ensuring the building has resilience against whatever the future may bring – whether that be external events such as floods or power outages, or changes in technology that may result in obsolescence – is vital. Stripping out and replacing damaged or obsolete equipment has significant costs, both financially and environmentally.

Bad Data

May: A statistic from an Autodesk report this year said bad data may have caused 14% of all construction rework, equalling to 88.69 billion dollars in avoidable rework world-wide. Bad data also costs 1.84 trillion due to poor decision making.

If data is bad and you feed it into the technology, bad data in, bad data out. Five years later you find actually the building hasn’t been sustainable and it would have been better to tear it down and start again as opposed to retrofitting.

I think one of the ongoing issues is pure computer or software errors. If someone enters information in a slightly incorrect way and there’s a software bug that impacts how the build occurs, the efficiency of it and the end result doesn’t produce what was hoped for.

Another point is to do with interoperability. If all your project team are using different types of software, different versions of software which don’t quite talk to each other properly there will be gaps in the interpretation and that impacts the design and construction decisions, so your end result isn’t as productive or efficient as possible.

Copyright

May: Another issue which I have seen over the years is issue of copyright. So if you have an existing building, you may have a slight complication of who owns the original design that you then need to amend or develop. Are you entitled to do that? If you get that copyright license and you then develop that design but something goes wrong, who then holds that responsibility?

Change Management

Simon: We’re seeing a rise in building apps that can help us communicate to building users how things are supposed to work. Things often haven’t gone wrong with technology, they鈥檙e just not necessarily being used as they were meant to. Using technology to communicate to people that they’re supposed to open windows when they get too hot, or perhaps move spaces. I think that technology can help us solve the problems that technology also might create.

Marta: I love the point about change management, this idea that we could design this super, smart, amazing building, and if you haven’t anticipated the handover process, the whole thing could just fall on its face. I often think about this transition from the design process to the operations phase, and how critical that documentation is. I think there’s huge opportunities with digital twin to be a record keeping space for a lot of our decision-making information. We can transition from a BIM design environment to a BIM operating environment and have a repository of all those decisions.

Cyber Security

Jules: I think the most impactful risk of technology is the cyber security risk which can have enormous consequences. By putting technology in buildings, we are dramatically increasing the number of access points for a hacker, and you need to think about that at every stage of design. The consequence of the building being hacked can be quite substantial. There are stories of people managing to hack into a building through a connected device that you then leap through onto other devices in the building. The version of the story that always seems to appear, seems to point blame at the thermometer in the fish tank.

Financial Risk

Jules: It’s been a mission of my life over the past decade to persuade people that the cost of technology is not insurmountable. Doing the most one could possibly do in terms of tech and tech infrastructure in a building never amounts to more than a very small number of percentage points on the cost of building a building in the first place.

The most likely risk is not the worst risk in the world, which is that you just wasted your money. You could find you’ve put technology in and it’s not doing what you thought it needed to do, so you’ve wasted your money on technology that either is obsolete or is ineffective, so you need to put something else in. This is why we have to think about what it is we鈥檙e trying to achieve, then build the technology on the back of that.

Reuse and Circularity

Simon: I think we need to develop more of an ecosystem that is tailored towards reusing, recycling, and retaining things where possible. Drawing on the title of this webinar, it should never be okay just to chuck these things away. We always should be questioning, how can we reuse these and extend their life?