The Construction Technology Handbook. Hugh Seaton
That's happening right now with construction project management software, where beginning in about 2015, more and more companies have set about digitizing the construction workflow – changing the technology domain from paper and Microsoft Excel, to unified platforms that deal with different parts of the construction process, or all of it. In time, there will be winners and losers – probably not the monopolies we see in consumer markets, but definitely fewer product offerings.
Redomaining can often come from other industries. Take building security, for example. The videocassette made possible an entirely new capability for the capture and storage of video from cameras in a building, cameras which themselves had been changed from film to digital in around the same 1980s' timeframe.
But in the later 1990s, content of all kinds, from music to video and images all began to convert into digital formats. These started as CDs, but then changed into MPEG video and MP3 audio. Around 2000, consumer markets started marketing players for these digital formats, which drove down the cost for digital storage for security, leading to today's systems that are entirely digital. In fact, systems like building security have seen a series of technological domain changes, from videocassettes, to CDs, to hard drives, to the cloud most recently.
It is often the case that developments in other markets, especially consumer markets, create pressure to change in other markets, because the technology becomes cheap and familiar to users.
These model changes, the redomaining, is going to happen no matter what. But the specific way it happens is not inevitable. This is an important lesson for technology in construction: pressures of technological advance mean that the construction process will continue to digitize, will continue to absorb and integrate new technologies, but any given company or product could succeed or fail. How to assess these products will be one of the key takeaways of this book, as we go through each of the technology areas that you will encounter.
What's Different about Digital Technology
No one needed to write a Construction Technology Handbook when the technologies being used were confined to the individual trades, and involved tools and machinery that exploited mostly physical effects. Learning to use a nailgun was not a huge leap from a hammer; learning to use increasingly powerful and sophisticated power tools was usually an evolutionary process where features kept getting better.
In these instances, workers can see how the technology works, can understand intuitively how to at least use the technology, even if it might take years to master the craft overall.
In contrast, digital technology does its work out of sight, in non‐physical ways that humans cannot immediately grasp, using controls that aren't “natural” in the way a hammer's handle is. Older technologies exploit physics, which humans naturally understand.
Digital technologies exploit electronic phenomena, which are so small that we cannot see them. Digital technologies also build layers of human‐designed interfaces that don't have to rely on intuition or natural movement at all, they are completely the invention of the product developer. And that means the intuition and experience that work so well with physics‐based technologies don't help us with digital technologies, and that can be alienating and annoying. These human‐designed interfaces do have logic, though, and are based on real engineering – so you can learn that logic and become just as comfortable with digital technologies as you are with anything else.
That logic, that “physics” of digital technology is what this book is about. We have already started from the beginning, defining what we mean, and will build up the rules and frameworks that give you a deep understanding of what makes digital technologies tick.
Your Community
For years, the Architecture, Engineering and Construction (AEC) industry has been among the slowest to adopt technology, in part because the technology that was introduced early on was often not well adapted to the needs of the industry and its different parts. In the past decade or so, a number of community efforts have arisen to give the AEC industry, especially construction professionals, opportunities to learn about technology, while giving the technology industry a window into one of the oldest, most complex industries.
Perhaps the first of these was the AEC Hackathon, an event series that I helped kick off in 2013. Founded by Damon Hernandez and Paul Doherty, the event was created to break down barriers between AEC industry people and tech people. By solving real problems together, both sides get an appreciation for the other. We've run over 50 of these around the world, changing the format to an online version in the post‐pandemic world. Now that they are digital, I encourage you to check one out; go to www.hackaec.com to see what's out there, and find others like you who are on a digital journey.
In the years since 2013, startups and venture capital have discovered construction, and there has been a flood of solutions for everything from 3D scanning to daily reports. Not all of these came from a good understanding of what's really needed on a jobsite, and in fact going back a little further even more of the software pushed to the construction site came from other places, like accounting. We've heard stories of “app‐fatigue,” and a general concern that field personnel especially are not a big enough part of the tech development and adoption process.
We need to change that.
In this book, I share new skills, and a new mindset toward technology. Whether you're already a construction technologist and have “drunk the kool‐aid,” or worried about how technology will impact your life, you will find ideas of value in these pages.
Through this new digital toolkit you'll look at technology differently, from the inside of how it gets made to how it gets packaged and adopted. You'll also see that the people who make software and other kinds of technology are very similar to construction, especially the trades. The big difference is where construction expertise is aimed at putting work in place, technology expertise is aimed at “making it go.” Both sets of professionals take enormous pride in what they do, and by understanding technology as just another toolkit, you can blend the strengths of both the construction and the technology mindsets.
It is often said that training teaches you how to do, education teaches you how to think. A book like this is educational – so ask questions along the way, and try to see things with the mindset of a technologist.
Mindset Matters
What do we mean by “mindset?”
We started the book with an assertion: How you think about the world changes what you do, and how you do it.
That is a mindset. And the promise that idea makes is this: Change your mindset and you can change your possibilities. Anyone who's played sports will agree that mindset is everything.
What specifically does a changed mindset change in your real work or life? For a start, it changes what you pay attention to, and what you think is worth your time.
In a complex, fast‐moving environment like construction, you have to pick out what matters from a sea of events, meetings, and messages. You can't figure out what matters if you don't have an idea about how the world works – a model of what causes what, and what is important in the end.
Construction has always had a huge toolkit, from MIG welders to hand tools to heavy machinery, and everything in between. Most of those tools are based on processes that have evolved slowly and, as discussed above, are based on observable effects. To make those processes successful, the construction mindset has been one of relying on past experience, trusting your gut, and a constant anxiety about what might go wrong that you cannot see. This mindset is why superintendents, in fact why almost everyone, is constantly inspecting the jobsite – they are looking directly at everything, only trusting their own eyes.
The mindset and mental models that made one good at construction traditionally are not the same as the mindset that will make you a master of both the trade you