The Construction Technology Handbook. Hugh Seaton
by an almost universal dropping of birth rates over the decades to levels that are too low for the native population to replace itself. This pattern is leading to shrinking populations in most of Europe, Japan, and soon, China. Africa, in contrast, is exploding in population, and will continue to do so for some years.
This aging of the population in the north and surging growth in the south will have big implications for where construction happens, how it happens, and how many young people are available in the local market to work in construction. As an industry that faced years of labor shortages, this will be another driver of technology adoption as we seek to augment human workers with technology of varying kinds.
Far from automation taking jobs, in Europe, North America, and much of Asia, automation will save jobs by making projects possible that wouldn't have been possible without it.
Change Driver #2: Climate Change
In the United States, 40% of greenhouse gases come from the built environment. Globally the number is similar, at 39%.
The construction industry is projected to create 2.2 billion tons of waste by the year 2025. That is a massive number, and it cannot be sustained forever. In recent years, for example, many developing nations have stopped accepting US and European solid waste, forcing hard choices about where to put it. The great Pacific garbage patch, a floating collection of small and large plastic roughly 1.6 million square kilometers in size, is evidence that concern about where we put our trash has gone from an environmentalists' abstract warning to a concrete, practical reality that threatens our food supply, as well as our actual health.
Whether it's from governments, concerned groups, or investors, the pressure to reduce solid waste from construction is only going to grow in the coming years.
Climate change is not just a negative driver, though. While construction does contribute to climate change, it is also our first line of defense against many of the dangers climate change will pose. As low lying areas in Italy, the Netherlands, and in the USA, including most of southern Florida and the gulf states of Alabama, Mississippi, and especially Louisiana face the prospect of rising seas, it will be up to construction to build the walls, levees, and drainage that will save our communities from the storm surges that increasingly threaten them. It is easy to look at projections of whole areas of the country underwater in 50–100 years and be dismissive of these projections as uncertain. But we cannot overlook the fact that it isn't required that the land to be underwater for there to be a threat – hurricanes like Katrina and Sandy showed how much damage a two‐day storm can wreak with oceans right where they are now.
Change Driver #3: Demands of Owners
Owners and developers have become more and more demanding in recent years, whether it be for increased safety, or more recently, workforce development. Organizations like the Construction Users Round Table (CURT) often lead the way in driving new standards, and certification mechanisms that lead owners to require higher levels of effort to achieve these certifications. And as more and more technology companies become owners of built environmental assets, they are demanding the use of project and field management technologies that are on par with other areas of their businesses.
Change Driver #4: 2020 Pandemic Response
Within weeks of the lockdowns caused by the Covid‐19 pandemic, construction companies and their technology providers were adjusting to the need for social distancing by conducting many more meetings remotely, and were beginning to apply on‐site sensing technology to monitor social distancing.
Companies like StructionSite, that provide 360° photo management of job sites, provided their services free or at reduced fees for construction clients who were adjusting to social distancing, and who were suddenly less keen to send non‐essential staff anywhere. Similarly, like everyone else, construction teams have become much more willing to hold meetings over digital teleconferencing software. After months of this, many have permanently changed workflows and processes to be more digital and remote.
The length of the social distancing requirements during lockdown and gradual re‐opening has meant that many processes will change forever, and the coming years will see the effects of that change as new features on existing products, as well as entirely new products, are introduced to address these changes, and in some cases make new workflows possible. As an example, we expect that virtual and augmented reality will both find swifter acceptance and adoption in a world where being together physically is much less valued than it once was.
Across industries, we have seen company after company report that the Covid‐19 pandemic has led to a decade of technology adoption happening in a few months. It has caused cherished assumptions, like the need to be physically in the same space, to be challenged and proven wrong, making other assumptions open to re‐evaluation. We cannot yet know the final impact of so large a change, but Covid‐19 has already led to big changes in construction's use of technology.
Technology Supply
At the same time that these factors pressure construction industry players to adopt new technologies, recent years have seen a flood of new technology products, especially software. Everything from new ways to create, share, and use Building Information Models (BIM), to a flurry of project management solutions, to drones, voice‐operated software, and much more has suddenly become available. Along the way, the venture capital community and other investors have “discovered” construction technology, leading to more and more options.
While this flood has led to some companies feeling like it's too much too soon, construction companies have created teams focused on successfully navigating all the options, adopting these new technologies and making them work for their teams in the field and back in the office.
And with all of these folks pushing to create new solutions, some genuinely useful things are coming to market. It is no exaggeration to say that products like Procore have transformed how work gets managed and handled on the jobsite. Workflow and jobsite capture tools like Holobuilder change the level of awareness companies have of their jobs across space and time in a truly meaningful way.
The past few years have seen an evolution from clunky, disconnected point solutions to more networked approaches where many software solutions do in fact work together. However, truly connecting every software product together remains a difficult problem in construction, with many companies either hacking together solutions, or suffering through the painful double and triple data entry issues that have plagued the industry for years.
All of these solutions are coming at the construction industry because they, or something like them, are already being used in other industries – construction has, for valid reasons, been a slower adopter of technology for most of its recent history. The benefit of being second – or let's face it, more like a distant fifth – to the technology party behind other industries is that construction firms and workers are able to learn from decades of thinking about digital transformation and cherry pick the best ideas.
This book will help you do that.
Use of technology is a technology
Every time you use a powertool, or a non‐powertool for that matter, you are applying knowledge, and that is a technology. Processes, know‐how, these are all a kind of technology, they are a means of getting something done for a purpose.
Every new tool requires that you learn some things. A new kind of hand tool takes some practice, and real‐world fiddling around to understand how to use it. This is, again, a kind of technology. For these sorts of non‐digital tools, though, there's really no point in calling it “technology,” it's just called “know‐how.”
The reason I call out this definition of technology, as the how to do things, not just the what to use, is because unlike non‐digital tools, software and digital solutions work in very predictable, narrow ways that you must learn in a very different way from how you learn a