The technical issues are primarily around ensuring solvent waste is neither mixed with other solvents nor with other water-based waste streams.

He’s also concerned about people focusing too heavily on potentially incidental uses of technology within buildings, which, he says, ultimately won’t contribute to solving the bigger picture problem.He talks about his experience working within the design and construction industry in Australia, and the way contractual risk is pushed down onto contractors, who then push it further down the chain.

This is problematic, he says, because the great unlock we’re seeking in the construction industry is going to come from those lower tiers, with people like the rebar tradesman, the electrician and the plumber.. Bryden Wood agree that one of the key issues blocking the progress of the industry is the struggle to try and get digital construction technology down into the supply chain through the massive long-tail of small suppliers.The large general contractors and consultants have already adopted digital to quite a significant extent.However, getting construction technology down to the smaller contractors and lower tiers on a construction site remains challenging.

Without their involvement, we aren’t gathering valuable site data, which simply evaporates.Therefore, the logical question becomes, how do we engage those people?.

asBuilt believes we need to find a way for those workers to use construction technology onsite without even realising they’re doing it.

In this way, we’ll unlock more technology, more often.Within the lifetime of that programme, we hope to have fundamentally changed the way physical building is done, the way we use MMC, and the way we deliver assets.

Such a success would pave the way for P-DfMA and other MMC methodologies to be rolled out across other social infrastructure, including schools, social housing and more.We envision that there is likely to be about a ten-year window of opportunity here, and the industry needs to make a start.

It also seems likely that within the grand scheme of things on the horizon, the digital work will take longer than the physical aspects, and we should be conscious of that.. Miranda Sharp reminds us that digitising planning and the wider built environment won’t be easy to do.Some of the necessary work will be boring, and it will be a grind to make the data interoperable and set the transaction mechanisms.