As we’re able to drive better and better performance through energy efficient equipment and passive design techniques, we can actually start reducing our operational carbon right from the early design stages.
We need to pause, reflect on our purpose, try to see different perspectives, different routes forward; bring light to our present.. We need to try different things, do things in different ways, make new connections.. A few weeks ago I was involved in a conversation about pharmaceuticals.Many of the drugs we take are synthesised ultimately from oil or use significant amounts of fossil fuels to produce.
Agricultural, paper and wastewater industries dispose of significant amounts of carbon-based compounds which could be the feedstocks for these drug substances.Creating new connections between industries that work largely independently could have a significant impact on the sustainability of the pharmaceutical industry.This different perspective is exciting.
Bryden Wood is supporting this idea, and many others, that will be part of the change in approach we need..Doing things differently, letting go of what we have known either in Christmas traditions or any other traditions, or processes and procedures we follow, or the pre-judgements we hold onto can feel hard.
Humankind became dominant through its adaptability, our neo-cortex in our brains is incredibly plastic and moulds to allow us to adapt our whole life.
To enact the change both individually and collectively we just need to recognise that we are stuck in the Devil’s Snare and decide to stop struggling..DfMA itself can be based on a set of repeatable elements and processes to derive gains, and ultimately could transform the construction industry so that it more closely resembles manufacturing.
With Industry 4.0 now a key part of many sectors, research and development into construction automation is also a rapidly growing area.Additionally, the skill sets required to implement methods such as Discrete Event Simulation are becoming more commonplace as the industry steadily adopts more facets of digital design..
Despite the advances, construction planning is still typically done using static Gantt charts which, although highly detailed, often have the potential to be inflexible, inefficient and inaccurate, and cannot allow stakeholders to explore fully and rapidly the ‘what if’ of projects and the effects of their decisions on the final product.A lack of clear visualisation can also limit the communication of the planning to the project team and again result in an unclear relationship between project briefing, design and execution.