Introduction to NXT BLD and AEC Magazine

AEC is at an inflection point. It’s clear that something is wrong. The industry is awash with proposed paths but where do they lead?

It turns out we don’t have to invent a path. We just need to copy and adapt it to AEC. The presentation will focus on the path to copy, how to adapt it to AEC and where to start.

In Michael Marks’ experience, market disruption centers around the question, “Why not?” Large, mature industries are usually set in their own ways of doing things: thus the reason that companies he has invested in or led such as Tesla, GoPro, Flex, and Katerra have had the opportunity to disrupt these multi-billion-dollar industries.

This session will cover Michael’s experience as an operator and an investor, leveraging patterns in businesses and industries that are ripe for disruption. From driving hypergrowth at Flex, interim leadership at Telsa, early investment in GoPro, and spotting unlikely successes, such as Crocs shoes, Michael has helped to transform entire industries.

Michael will share what he has learned from investing in construction technology, and why he firmly believes that industrial methods, coupled with innovative software, might deliver buildings in months, as opposed to years.

Join Chris and Jeff for a very special product announcement from Lenovo

The AEC sector accounts for 40% of all global carbon emissions and creates an estimated one-third of the world’s overall waste. To this day, it is one of the most most archaic and polluting industries. Digital design tools, combined with digital manufacturing techniques such as 3D printing and recyclable materials, can break this age-old paradigm and can give people worldwide direct access to sustainable spatial solutions: smart, beautiful, affordable, and on-demand.

Aectual is the World’s first global platform for made-to-measure interior and architectural products made in a 100% circular manner by help of advanced manufacturing. They collaborate with known architects and designers, and create fully recyclable architectural features such as furniture, finishes and facades. In this keynote, Co-founder Hedwig Heinsman will show how Aectuals parametric design products combined with Advanced Manufacturing can lead to a new ‘democratization’ of interior and architectural design and smarter (re-)use of resources.

Tasked with improving productivity through the adoption of new technology, Manzatucci oversees the digitalisation journey of Skanska UK. In leading the Innovation Strategy, he engages with forward thinking developers. In this presentation he will explore how technology, including artificial intelligence (AI), can improve real-time decision making in construction projects.

Adoption of real-time technology is accelerating as firms recognize the benefits that virtualized processes and hardware deliver – especially in times of crisis. Digital replicas, twins and the metaverse all have one thing in common: real-time 3D technology. This talk will cover some of the adventures in real-time that are taking place along with revealing a new report on how architectural firms are benefiting from adoption of the technology.

This talk will give insights on multidisciplinary research that explores autonomous construction using distributed robotic systems. Distributed robotic refers to a large number of small, agile construction robots that can produce complex, functionally adapted assemblies from individual parts in highly parallel processes. This represents a fundamentally different approach than the current trends towards the automation of individual pre-digital construction machines. As such the application of distributed robotics systems on construction sites, where the machines required can fit in a suitcase, would require a shift in the current state of building construction. This talk discusses this shift through the presentation of ongoing research on the development of a specific distributed robotic system. This system is composed of team of single-axis robots which leverage timber struts for locomotion, material manipulation and in turn the assembly of architectural structures.

Designing [with] Machines aims to investigate and establish design methodologies that consider robotic hardware development as part of the overall design process and its output. Through this work, a design practice emerges that moves beyond the design of objects towards the design of technologies and processes that enable new ways of both creating and interacting with architectural spaces. The practice specifically focuses on the development of task-and task-specific robotic devices and systems that are inherently suitable for in-situ fabrication as architectural intervention within the context of existing building stock.

It’s been a long time coming, but we are about to enter an era where we will all have the ability to quickly and easily make 3D reality captures of environments or objects using the phone in our pockets.

Plop plop. A look at the technology, design and aesthetics behind Townscaper, the colourful digital town building toy. Perhaps some of it might even be useful in real world?

Conor challenges the very way we design alongside computers,  in order to unshackle design of the built environment from the grips of automation. He will talk about quantifying experience and truly generative design.

In this talk Claypool will discuss the work of Automated Architecture Ltd (AUAR) and its associated research lab AUAR Labs at UCL.

AUAR is revolutionising house building using automation, bringing a distributed approach to housing production with a fully digital supply chain.

Increasing manufacturing capacity is a big part of Intel’s plan to meet the surging demand for advanced semiconductors that power a new generation of innovative products. Our recent project announcements have created an unprecedented construction roadmap that surpasses all prior benchmarks. Such a roadmap demands that we think differently about the way we engineer and construct our factories. Intel is innovating on all fronts but two of the innovative strategies being deployed are scaling our approach to off-site pre-fabrication and creating designs that can easily be replicated between projects with the goal of taking the design phase off the critical path. Both strategies demand digital tools and digital workflows to be successful. During our talk we will share some of the challenges of building multiple mega-projects in parallel with an eye towards sustainability and how we are breaking old paradigms to ensure we can meet the demand for semiconductors to power the worlds innovations.

Architectural design is to solve a human problem and demands an in-depth understanding of the complex person-environment relations, which manifest a dynamic “entanglement” between humans and the physical environments. As James Gibson’s ecological theory postulates, humans can effectively perceive the 3D surroundings through 2D retinas because we move and look around in space and obtain constantly changing views as we carry out meaningful behaviors. However, when architects conceive and design our future living spaces, they do not have proper digital design tools to empathize with the end users. Introducing Project Fission and Downtown Explorer, this presentation highlights Unreal Engine’s tremendous potential in building immersive, real-time 3D tools that foreground humans’ dynamic visual relations with the built environment in the design process. Such tools seamlessly integrate the capacities of formal generation, visual simulation, and design evaluation without alienating designers from real-world visual experiences.

Over the past 15 years we have created a huge number of standards, concepts and acronyms which all interlink and overlap. The presentation will explore how we can start to bring this together using the idea of data models, with a focus on IFC to form a foundational ‘information layer’ which technology plugs into.

The presentation will then explore the future, including where this way of thinking could take us to optimise connected data, allowing us to gain the most amount of value from our information.

As we surf the crest of another technology wave, one of the most significant to impact the workstation market in over a decade – It is important to understand moving forward how these new architectures will influence your team’s efficiency, ever growing workstream complexity, time to market, and most importantly, budgets.

Learn from Lenovo and their performance engineering teams how to maximize any new IT investments, optimize the latest hardware setups for modern AEC workflows, what to avoid and how best to enable your workforce with an ever-increasing movement to mobile & hybrid working.

Come learn about Omniverse Enterprise 2.0, see the latest updates (VR, measure tool, Navigator, etc.) how Omniverse Enterprise is helping the AEC industry. See how simulation data can be tied into your design. Learn how you can collaborate in real-time whether on your PC, in VR or doing AR. As someone changes the design see those changes in real-time on any screen. Remember Omniverse Enterprise can be used local, private cloud, public cloud or any combination of that.

How to build what you’re designing, is emerging as a new baseline of knowledge for an architect. Understanding the physics of moving materials, labor resources and equipment needs to make your design easy to construct now has a profound impact on decisions that can leverage industrial preconstruction methods. Getting the right decision data in the right people’s hands, as early as possible is fundamental to the success of DFMA. In this session, Joel will share his experiences and learnings in providing the correct, quantified and unseen contextual data before, during and after prefabrication Decisions, and the resulting success in adopting IC/MMC solutions successfully.