The built environment entered the digital realm over the past decades, and it is now time for a true digital revolution. Assessment of its challenges and readiness towards digital transformations, both disruptive and innovative, presents potential competitive advantage over the competition, economic and environmental benefits and strategic vision. Future growth and economic capacity rely on human resource capacity, international competitiveness and incorporating sustainable standards (Fan et al., 2021). This comes with significant risks while disruptive technology, such as 3D printing technology, continues to impact the global supply chain and logistics industry (Beltagui et al., 2020). By incorporating specifically required skill sets in disruptive technology and using modern educational practices, a new mindset where disruptive technology is approached with rigour and ambition, and both hard/soft skills can be developed as specific assets to improve organisational and individual capabilities.
The Brookings Institute has indicated that America will require 100 million jobs with significant digital skills. Two-thirds of the jobs created in the last decade require either high or moderate digital skills (Muro et al., 2017). The lack of enough qualified workers has been highlighted as a cause of limiting tech job growth in America (TechServe Alliance, 2018). A lack of “soft skills” will severely hamper the effort to reduce the digital skill gap. Other studies, mostly using developed country data, recognise that machines may transform the tasks underlying jobs, leaving 95% of jobs intact, but with a different profile (Arntz, 2016) and that automation will require a broad range of knowledge; most of which is less about computer programming and more about digital literacy (technical knowledge) and human skills (Cunningham and Pimhidzai, 2018).
Papers in this Special Issue
The first paper in this Special Issue, innovation in building designs to improve energy performance, reducing CO2 emissions and minimising life cycle cost was the driver for the paper. Le Gia et al. researched into the design performance in the early design stages of cooling dominated buildings in hot and human climates. The case studies were conducted in Vietnam, which witnessed an exponential demand for high-rise buildings in urban areas. With high demand, came haste and complacency. Therefore, the importance and disruption of design process in its early stages. This paper exploited the NSGA-II optimisation algorithm to simulate and optimise investment cost and energy consumption, focusing on the thermal envelope, glazing and energy systems from preliminary design phases. Results demonstrated optimal solutions present the trade-off between energy consumption and capital cost compared to existing building design.
While Le Gia et al. looked into design optimisation, the second paper explores the mobile ICT in capturing and managing construction quality assurance information during the construction phase of the project, in the context of passive fire protection. Atkinson et al. argue that the migration from the traditional hardcopy approach into the digital space and its availably during emergency sessions were the disruptive process. Main challenges include existing and sharing of technology; people, social and user competency; technical compliance and evidence; and conventional process improvement.
Continuing the theme of disruptive technologies, the third paper by Truong-Hong et al. proposed terrestrial laser scanning point clouds to measure deformation for structural assessment. Laser scanning technology has the ability to provide high accuracy datasets of entire surfaces of deformation, instead of discrete locations on surfaces from traditional surveys. This process could also be deployed in sensitive, dangerous and emergency situations. Truong-Hong et al. demonstrated the procedure of using laser scanning data, use of segmentation for extracting data points, selection of reference surface and eliminating outlier/noisy data on deformative analysis.
The fourth paper in this Special Issue focussed on the development of an urban sustainability tool for developing countries, with specific Case Studies from Nigeria. Developing countries are experiencing drastic increase in urban growth that is not addressed by sustainability principles. Momoh et al. argues that to better understand how this can be achieved, there is a bespoke urban assessment tool that work within its context that can inform how developing countries could benefit not only to be sustainable today but also for the future. This paper proposes new social, environmental, economic and planning sustainability dimensions with 21 core indicators and 105 indicators of sustainability.
Jalali et al. explore the possibilities of learning from plants. The paper looks into biological-inspired design by exploring plant mechanisms and features to develop a new framework to approach water-harvesting design concepts. The first step defines the water harvesting mechanisms; the water problem; extraction and plant-to-design abstraction; and its application. Learning from plants' water harvesting strategies will contribute to efficiency in different disciplines in the built environment.
Last but not least, the final paper emphasised on the topological geometry to the architectural concept design process in the flow of digitalisation to explore novel architectural spaces and forms dynamic, easily adaptable to the context and surroundings. Nguyen and Nguyen explored design thinking, architectural design methods and architectural compositions to be compared with current practices. Topological design thinking and exploring architectural ideas in the digital realm presents endless possibilities as we embrace Industry 4.0 for the built environment. This paper contributes a novel design thinking based on topological geometry to be combined with modern digital technologies (e.g. BIM) in architectural design theory.
Closing reflections
The myriad of disruptive and innovative technologies aimed towards a more sustainable future for the built environment are very being encouraged and challenging. From the advancements in new technologies and borrowing technologies from other sectors to fit; new frameworks for a more sustainable building design and urban development at different points of the construction process and changing the way we fundamentally provide solutions by learning from plants and topological geometry, this Special Issue provides a snapshot on the current state of the art in a timely manner.
This Special Issue is part of the research study in Engineering Skills Where they are Most Needed (No. ESMN1921\1\129), and it is supported by the Royal Academy of Engineering and the Lloyd's Register Foundation UK.
