Newly adopted habits also affect residential design.

UK construction companies have been slow to enable staff to be part of committees where standards are created.This is a missed opportunity, as all parties should be working together to advance the whole industry in this regard.

Regulations should have a significant and authoritative amount of input as they are developed, particularly given the long-term nature of the work, with buildings expected to last between 60-100 years.Equally, spending more time in the design phase of a project would enable us to truly understand the brief and open up the problem statement, ultimately preventing projects beset with difficulties as a result of a lack of planning.. One challenge we’ll face going forward is that, as innovation increases and we begin to iterate more quickly, the lag between innovation happening and standards struggling to keep up, will begin to get in the way.The construction industry will need to find better ways to reach a consensus faster and deliver better outcomes.

Adopting more open source methods, perhaps akin to Wikipedia, could offer a solution.For example, Highways England is currently transforming the.

Design Manual for Roads and Bridges (DMRB).

into a new form, aiming to set the standard for engineering documents in the digital future.The construction industry should be a place where young digital natives can come and use their skills and passion for technology to do something meaningful to help tackle the climate crisis.

However, if we don’t make this evident to them, they’ll go to work for pure technology companies instead.Construction and the wider built environment will miss out.

But it doesn’t have to be that way.We took SEISMIC, our school design app, to a primary school in Hackney.