Technology + Built Environment
As an industry, our modus operandi has been to connect everything to everything else. Plant, sensors, access control, lifts, lighting, room booking, visitor management, energy platforms, workplace apps, tenant experience tools, you name it, we integrated it. And good job we did, AI enablement needed it! The commercial case for doing so sounded sensible enough: […]
The distinction between smart buildings and smart cities is often framed as one of ambition: cities are simply “bigger”, more complex versions of buildings, aren’t they? In practice, this assumption has proven unhelpful. The real difference is not scale alone, but the qualitative shift in complexity that occurs as we move from buildings to cities, […]
The smart buildings industry did something genuinely impressive over the last decade. Faced with fragmented supply chains, overlapping scopes, and technologies falling between trades, it created a delivery construct that mostly worked. The Master Systems Integrator brought clarity to capital projects. It defined accountability, reduced chaos, and made it possible to deliver increasingly complex smart […]
There’s a moment in every smart building project when the confetti settles and reality walks in. The app works. The dashboards load. Then, within weeks, the control room drifts back to radio calls and spreadsheets. The gap isn’t technological, it’s operational. That’s why the most valuable deliverable on any PropTech programme isn’t a feature list, […]
In the not-too-distant future, building owners may hold more than just high expectations – they might use the courts as a tool for enforcing design quality. As KPIs for sustainability, health and wellbeing, and community engagement shift from being woolly should-haves to baseline requirements, accountability in building design will inevitably transform. Miss these critical targets, […]
As smart buildings start to enter the mainstream for most corporates, there’s a common challenge that keeps popping up – who should own the smart capability within a company? Today, most offices are more than just desks, a coffee machine and passive-aggressive emails. They’re complex, tech-enabled ecosystems, replete with sensors, data analytics, and automated systems […]
In his September 2023 column, Dr. Matthew Marson addresses the integrity issues within the PropTech industry, highlighting misleading marketing claims and dishonest practices. He warns readers to verify vendor claims and emphasizes the importance of credibility in decision-making. As an experienced leader in Smart Buildings, Dr. Marson provides insightful observations on industry challenges and trends.
from: https://www.imeche.org/news/news-article/how-the-imeche%27s-digital-operations-are-being-revamped-to-offer-a-better-service Back when the Institution was founded, the technology of the time was the steamboat, the railway and the telegram. Today, we’ve mastered engineering to the point that we’re asking ChatGPT (an artificial intelligence chatbot that can compose reports, poems, offer advice and more) for support in our everyday work. As engineers, we continue […]