We’re always excited to talk to other industry players who share our goals, focus and passion for modern methods of construction, driving improvement by embracing change and leaning into construction tech.. We caught up with Craig Lamont, Chief Commercial Officer for Australian digital specialists, asBuilt, and found out how they’re using construction technology in smart and unconventional ways onsite.
He points out that these people didn’t go into planning to do those things.They went into planning to do the subjective work, and to do the planning..
While working on the Reducing Invalid Planning Applications project (RIPA), Ricketts began to map all of the legislation and planning policy, turning it into rules-based code.He wondered whether it could be used to map against BIM models, in order to extract all of the relevant information that planners need to assess and develop a decision.The aim would be to extract only the relevant pieces of information, out of the hundreds of thousands of bits of information in a BIM, leading to the question of how to present it for successful interpretation.
This is where his second project, Back-office Planning Service (BoPS), comes in.BoPS would take the information and present it to the case officer.
Ricketts says that although it all works in theory, in reality, we’re not even at the proof of concept stage yet.
At the moment, there are conversations happening with partners and stakeholders about how best to achieve the goal..We believe that there is and will always be a place for human intervention – a place for people to apply their design, construction and engineering know-how – it’s just about taking the tedious repetitive tasks away from humans and getting them to do the bits they’re good at.
And that includes solving the parts that are not worth automating or that are hardest to automate.There are very obvious ethical dimensions here too, about automating humans out of work – or, conversely, about automating the function of humans within working environments.. We’re not charging headlong into some dystopic future.
But we need to be aware that technology is not in a vacuum.As we’ve said, it should come with ethics attached.. We would say that we’re using design automation to make digital tools and technology that provide ‘intelligent control’.