Right Side of History?

​Quality, Consequences and the Construction Industrial Complex (part 47) – All IMHO:

Sometimes I think that current building design and construction practices are on the wrong side of history. Other industries are innovating, automating and digitizing yet the same old problems and solutions rule in the property industry. Maybe our children’s children, will look back at this time and wonder what we where all thinking with our poorly performing buildings and  their “Green Building” certificates. 

Whilst I am optimistic about the year ahead for CDML, the New Year always has me thinking about the future. My thoughts (the thoughts of a rambling mad man) are:

Short / Medium Term  

• Tight economic conditions with ultra low oil prices will lead to project cancellations, low professional fees and flat tender prices. particularly in the Mid East and Canada. This will lead to more copy, paste and print designs plus low quality construction. 
• Green building certifications, particularly LEED certification, will continue to decline in relevance despite attempts at “reinvention”. Buildings will increasingly be judged by energy efficiencies. 
• A proportion of engineering graduates will not find employment and move into other industries setting up a heightened skills shortage in 5 to 10 years time.
• Clients will start to get wise and demand buildings that actually work and perform. They will hire building design and construction professionals to directly help them with this. It will be a bit like the FBI hiring an insider trader to help them police the stock market. 

Longer Term

• Baby boomers will continue to retire and create a massive skills deficit. This will lead to young people exiting the building design and construction industry due to ridiculous workloads, high pressure combined with almost zero training and mentoring. 
• Vertically integrated building design and construction firms will dominate the market.
• Built environment big data accumulation, management and analysis will become a profession and revenue source for forward thinking firms in building design and construction.
• Evidenced based design and construction will be the norm, with contracutal consequences to building design and construction firms for poor post occupancy building performance.  

Consequences 

This almost perfect storm of low construction budgets plus a massive skills shortage will lead to change. Technology will be the answer to many of the issues above, however, BIM is not the answer IMHO. It is too expensive to deploy and implement plus there are not nearly enough skilled BIM technicians. BIM will not be ubiquitous until everyone can used it from the development executive to the FM technician without having to go through a training course, also the cost is prohibitively high. We need a Google (“Skynet”) solution here. The future of building design and construction is developers who are well informed and demand high quality & performance delivered by multi skilled design and construction teams that are held accountable for the quality and performance of their work.  The days of individual small & medium sized mechancial, electrical, structural and civil engineering design firms are coming to a close in North America. 

I am optimistic that the challenging factors listed above will finally lead to real digitization of building design, construction and verification. Designs will become less complex and more integrated, low cost digital design tools will emerge and construction management will also digitize (no more crappy FTP sites!). 

Building performance tested via Commissioning and on going verification will become milestones for payments to design and construction firms, mainly due to the low cost of digital controls and monitoring equipment with their ability to be networked. When I started work in 1980 pneumatic thermostats where the current technology. In my experience they where very expensive, always out of calibration, high maintenance and not resilient due to the plastic tubing frequently getting disturbed, broken or eaten by vermin. Today a thermostat is a low cost disposable digital technology, that is robust, provides close digital control and can be networked to the BMS. The future of building operation and validation is highly monitored and controlled (right sized) building services that are networked and analyzed by evolving algorithms. 

What to do (IMHO)?

1. Go digital when ever possible
2. Vertically integrate design and construction 
3. Hold design and construction teams accountable for building quality and performance based on real validation and monitoring