Held 20 – 22 October, Digital Construction Week is the event series for the entire built environment supply chain from design, construction and engineering to management and operation.
With digital technology revolutionising the architecture, engineering, construction and operation (AECO) world as we know it, Digital Construction Week will focus on the realities of digital innovation, technologies, and processes for businesses today and implications for the built environment of tomorrow.
In this, the first in a series of exclusive interviews, Oliver Hughes – Director of Digital Construction Week – discusses the exhibition’s origins, his aspirations for the event and the series’ eclectic schedule.
Tell us a little about Digital Construction Week and its origins.
It’s quite an ambitious project. The idea is to explore digital technologies and processes across the board in architecture, engineering and construction – from design all the way through to operation. It stems from the BIM conversation in so much as BIM’s done incredible things with the government mandate bringing about huge industry change and really bringing digital to the forefront of our industry.
But for me BIM has become a word for a lot of different technologies, so you have things like 3D printing, laser scanning, UAVs, advanced manufacturing, new methods of construction all falling in to the same conversation. There’s a lot more to it than just BIM as a process.
What we wanted to do is explore what digital meant in the broadest sense. So everything from using a system like box to store and manage files and data at a granular level, or a health and safety app that can save you hours at a time on every form you fill out, all the way up to using sensors and data monitoring on huge projects like Crossrail.
We want to explore a lot more and to do that we built into doing a whole week’s worth of activity because it becomes really challenging to cover something so broad, especially when talking about something that has such a huge impact on the entire industry. To do that in one day is impossible so we’ve built out this idea of a festival of everything digital in AECO.
We’ve got multiple events running throughout the week. We’re kicking off working with Autodesk, running their leadership conference.
It will have an international flavour, exporting UK expertise overseas and attracting an international delegation.
We’ve got the Westminster Reception on the Tuesday, which is about the government’s BIM mandate and the Level 2 deadline in 2016.
On the Wednesday and Thursday, there’ll be a huge expo with everything from BIM software to 3D printing, UAVs, laser scanning, and robotics. We’ve got a robotics company doing a live build, a digital lounge tech gallery, free to attend seminars and much more. We wanted to get away from the normal exhibition and create a Consumer Electronics Show or Wired magazine type of feel – something for the industry that people will get excited about seeing, something new and different.
That’s the kind of exhibition for two days, free to attend and we’re expecting 3,0004,000 people in that time. There are loads of freetoattend seminars as well as exciting exhibitors.
We also have a paidfor conference which I’m incredibly excited about, hopefully it will really break the mould. We’ve tried to follow the idea of having inspirational talks rather than having case study after case study. The TED style was a real inspiration. We’ve got a lot of nonindustry speakers who are real pioneers; Skylar Tibbits from MiT, Julie Alexander from Siemens, David McCandless, Richard Peters from Decoded. We’ve also got a host of leading industry figures who can help take vision through to reality.
The programme is designed as an ‘evolution’ conference. It’s all well and good saying we should be more innovative or adopt all these different technologies, but how do we do that practically, what are the barriers and what are the real opportunities?
And the aim then is to have all our different supporters, sponsors, partners to host their own fringe events on different topics and areas; Breakfast briefings, seminars and networking events.
We are looking to build a festival of activity to bring in the whole industry together. All this digital and technological innovation is going on, we just want to give a platform to help bring everyone together. We talk a lot of collaboration, so rather than focusing on engineers, contractors etc, in silos we want to bring everyone together, and that’s our aim no matter what level you’re at or what your profession.
There are three days of core events that we’re curating and then mini events throughout the week, designed to be more laid back.
How did Digital Construction Week come about? Where did the idea come from?
I think really just from different conversations ultimately. There’s pockets of excellence all over the place, the BIM conversation I think has helped show that. You pick up magazine like Wired or read about some of the projects getting funding and there’s stories about some of the amazing things going on in our industry and it’s really exciting.
The industry really feels like it’s at a turning point and the conversations I’ve had with our Steering Group and sponsors felt like this was an opportunity to showcase that.
I’m not an architect or an engineer but the industry is exciting to me and the digital side of things is different from the image from outside of industry. That’s kind of what interests me. There’s all this talk of growth, innovation, changing the image of our industry, skills, diversity, collaboration. Digital to me holds the key to unlocking many of these challenges.
The idea really developed through conversations with industry and the team behind the event is similar thinking from what I’ve had in the past and it matches up well. Having spent ten years in and around the industry I’m excited to see where we go from here.
For more information about event series please visit the Digital Construction Week website.
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