By Tom Sawyer Attendees at ENR's FutureTech conference gained a deeper appreciation of the technology shifts that are changing the character of the built world as the needs of the occupants change. Related Links: Construction Tech Companies Forecast a Cloudy Future Exploring the Future of Construction Through Science-Fiction Stories It is axiomatic that accurate forecasting should build on an understanding of the past and, particularly, of the economic drivers that shape the way we live, work and produce, said Paul D. Saffo, a technology forecaster, in a keynote presentation at ENR's FutureTech conference in San Francisco on March 19. "As
Related Links: Robots on the Jobsite Advancing in Construction Can a Robot Do Your Job? It Depends Within five to 10 years, a majority of construction workers will be interacting with real-time data on projects and deploying wearable, pervasive computing devices on jobsites, according to a survey of ENR readers.But readers are split on how much of a difference in productivity will result from all that real-time data and gadgetry.The survey went out to about 54,000 subscribers of ENR's FutureTech newsletter in early March and garnered 317 replies, three-quarters of which completed all the questions. (The results were unveiled on
In order to match the challenge of creating high performance buildings, the construction industry needs to move toward high performance construction, says McGraw Hill Construction senior director Stephen Jones. During his remarks to open ENR’s Futuretech conference March 18-19 in San Francisco, Jones said the industry should foster “the industrialization of construction to reduce risk and uncertainty and get better designs out there.”Lean construction practices are paramount to a high performance construction strategy, but awareness and adoption of lean techniques is lagging. According to a McGraw Hill Construction study conducted in 2013, 30% of firms surveyed had not heard of
Photo Courtesy WaterFX Pilot project plant in California's Central Valley is about to be scaled up to a commercial-grade system, with little added load on the electric grid. Related Links: WaterFX Profile of Panoche Water District from the Pacific Institute After a little more than eight months of operation, a pilot plant that uses solar energy to distill contaminated groundwater in the parched farmlands of California's Central Valley has performed so well that at least one expert is seeing a new gold rush on the way."We are actually sitting on a wealth of groundwater that just needs treatment," says Dennis
Map Courtesy of Detroit Blight Task Force Green squares denote parcels for which surveys are complete, gold squares are partially done, and purple squares are still to be done. Video by the Skillman Foundation A video from the Skillman Foundation on the Motor City Mapping initiative. Related Links: Detroit Makeover Gearing Up to Tear Down Old Structures Blog Post on Blexting from Hell Yeah, Detroit! Battling Blight: Detroit Maps Entire City To Find Bad Buildings Detroit is charting a plan to fight the blight that has plagued it for years, starting with a highly detailed map of the city itself.Two
Photo courtesy of Manhard Consulting Donald Willemarck, director of technology at Manhard Consulting, is looking forward to cutting the servers he maintains in his main office as a Nasuni customer. Related Links: Cloud-Integrated Storage Adds In-House Encryption BIM-in-The-Cloud Has New Competition With Newforma New distributed workforce collaboration systems rising in the AEC market are making an end run around crippling latency and bandwidth issues suffered by users sharing work on huge building-information-modeling file sets. They are doing it with hybrid systems of local and cloud servers, along with synchronization schemes that give everyone the speed of working locally, even among
Two years ago, I reported that the construction industry was dead last in IT spend as a percent of revenue compared to 14 other industries as reported by Gartner Research.Now, Gartner has broadened the construction industry category to include materials and natural resources, but the results are the same.In 2013, IT spend was 1% as a percent of revenue, 1.2% as a percent of operating expenses, and last on both measures compared to the 19 other industries surveyed. Gartner also put Construction in one of 12 industries where revenue is growing faster than IT spend, implying that it is unlikely
Related Links: See Cover story: Robots on the Jobsite Advancing in Construction The Future of Employment: How Susceptible Are Jobs to Computerisation? "While technological progress throughout economic history has largely been confined to the mechanisation of manual tasks, requiring physical labour, technological progress in the twenty-first century can be expected to contribute to a wide range of cognitive tasks, which, until now, have largely remained a human domain," write Frey and Osborne. As their paper lays out, jobs associated with hard, physical labor have been mechanized for centuries, with several notable shifts during the Industrial Revolution. Advances in the power
On a sunny day late last December on the track of the Homestead Miami Speedway in Florida, humanoid robots representing 16 teams from around the world opened doors, turned valves, cut through walls, struggled to climb ladders and drove all-terrain vehicles.
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