If you want to know what’s happening in the world of digital technology for buildings, you would be hard-pressed to go past the four speakers who shared their knowledge and insights at our first symposium on the topic late last year:
- Alex Harrington from The Warren Centre at the University of Sydney, who took our audience on a challenging ride to view the future and what we need to understand about the speed of change and its impact on our sector
- Stuart Bull from well-respected engineering leaders Laing O’Rourke, who showed us how BIM works in practice
- Cory Banks from Microsoft, who showed how to develop the business case for high- level technology and get support from your chief executive and the nance team
- Toby Maple from AECOM, who showed us how the big design firms – and the industry itself – needs to skill up and tool up
Our latest ebook here captures the presentations for all our readers who could not attend on the day, and also features additional contributions from Rory Martin from DWP Suters and a fantastic overview of the wider issues from our features writer Lynne Blundell.
Download a PDF version.
At The Fifth Estate we like BIM because it can theoretically deliver massive savings on the wastage that’s endemic in the design, delivery and management of our built environment. On- site building material waste alone is typically 30 per cent.
But are we there yet? Not quite.
A growing number of governments globally are supporting BIM technology.
In the UK BIM has been mandated in major government projects such as Cross Rail or its new iteration the HS2 (High Speed 2).
Singapore’s government has invested strongly in skilling up the industry because it knows that getting comfortable with sophisticated technology needs serious commitment and injection of resources that not everyone can manage up front.
New Zealand is engaging strongly in BIM.
And Australia has great intentions – a survey by McGraw Hill Construction found more than half of the design professionals surveyed expected to be heavy users of BIM.
But we’re not there yet.
Read this fascinating ebook to nd out where Australia is at now, where we are heading and what’s needed now.
A huge thanks to our major sponsor for this event and ebook, Newforma, which provides a data management system to deal with the output of such powerful technology, and venue sponsor JLL for hosting the event.