The Robots, the robots!….it’s an invasion!
Ummm okay, maybe a bit of an exaggeration, they’re not actually invading and this is not the War of the Worlds. So relax.
But it’s interesting when you think about it, if you follow technology you could easily be forgiven for thinking that every building site is now robotically enabled with drones hovering and buzzing about overhead like bees about their hive, tracking every step, and with microchips on everything, tracking every single piece of material.
Of course, that’s not the case.
It’s actually nothing remotely like it.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not arguing against technology, anything but that.
But I am offering a perspective.
Firstly, it’s inarguable that most technology in building caters to the enterprise end (large scale, commercial, retail, infrastructure and such) of the industry and fair enough.
At that end of the industry the appetite for tools which can transform the compliance, speed, safety and visibility within infrastructure projects, their financial capacity and their sheer scale to accommodate technology is as substantial as the projects they serve.
But the vast majority of construction and building people (i.e builders, sub-contractors, trades and all of related professions (like building certifiers, architects, engineers, QSs, etc, etc and so on), aren’t at the infrastructure end of the market. Not by a country mile (mile, kilometre, whatever).
The vast majority (resources, people and largely money too) is consumed at the other end of the wedge, the masses of building called home building, even including home improvement, small commercial builders, and the like.
The immediate application opportunity in this sector (again, the vast majority of resources, projects, people, money, etc) for things like robotics and drones, etc is limited (if not nil) for the masses of builders and therefore of virtually no benefit for all the housing consumers which they cater to either.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s not even remotely a criticism, at all. And I’m not knocking any developments in building technology, I assure you I’m the precise opposite!
But I guess it’s a lot like the old anecdote about microwave ovens. The first ones’ cost a bomb. Hundreds, if not thousands of dollars, and they we’re huge, forklift stuff!
With the scale and economies that flow from technology uptake, it soon meant that you could buy them a brand new microwave for <$50 and carry it under your arm.
No doubt construction robotics and the like will experience the same evolution soon enough, and they are already being deployed at the enterprise end, but that’s pretty much it.
That doesn’t mean that the pursuit of technology and its application to the built environment isn’t a) desperately needed and b) equally desperately overdue, but, there’s technology and there’s technology.
Robotics is just one form.
But by it’s very nature and in terms of it’s own evolution (think microwaves) it simply isn’t yet accessible to most projects or the technology sufficiently developed to meet the needs of the vast majority of builders.
That doesn’t mean that technology isn’t otherwise massively relevant in the form of, say, communications and project management tools.
And they are really accessible, hugely so, and just as enabling, if not moreso.
I can easily enough save a builder a quarter of a million bucks on a robot.
I can also just as easily improve a builder’s productivity by 25% (and then some) simply by using a mobile first cloud based unifying and inclusive project management and communications tool.
Easier said than done?
Just watch, because we’re already doing it every single day.
© Tony Huxley 2020
