PRiSM open source app demo - Precision Manufactured Homes for London

In other words, do the lights always go down when it rains?

I was involved in the nuclear sector when I was first approached to be an advisor in the UK Government Department of Energy and Climate Change.I quickly transitioned to a forerunner of the Infrastructure and Projects Authority where I spent nine years in central government before taking on my current role as Programme Director for the Construction Innovation Hub, with the aim of delivering the Construction Sector Deal.

I’ve worked through three different governments - Labour, Coalition and Conservative - but through them all there has been an increasing focus on the importance of infrastructure and transforming construction.. One thing I’ve noticed through this period is that we tend to think of ourselves in the engineering community as being innovators.We think we're quite good at working out what needs doing, but actually, the real skill, and one of the biggest lessons I’ve learned during my time in government, is that working out what to do can be quite easy.It's working out how to get it done that becomes hard.. At present, our focus is on transforming construction into a more future-facing sector.

We need to ask important questions about how to make it more inclusive and representative of the society it serves.. To begin, it’s essential to recognise that we can’t achieve our goals working in isolation.Problems like carbon emissions, poor build quality, labour shortages and the housing crisis - they can all be improved if we collectively refocus our energies and unify our processes.

The creation of the Construction Innovation Hub is a response to this need.

The Hub aims to overcome the industry’s current fragmentation and adopt a new, data-driven, industrialised construction approach.’, a free configurator that allows users to generate their own designs from a database of every piece of Lego ever manufactured..

The software has some superb features, including a ‘stability check’ to ensure the proposed design is suitably robust, a photorealistic rendering engine and an instruction-making tool to create assembly manuals in the same style as for the sets manufactured by Lego..The tool is also integrated into the Brick Link marketplace, so once a design is complete (and even as it is being developed) the price is constantly displayed, parts can be interrogated, and the bricks can be ordered direct from the marketplace.. What can we learn?.

The marketplace hosts its own configurator, making it possible to see how the price changes as design decisions are made, and then to procure the exact components needed.This capability would be enormously powerful for Platforms, helping clients and designers see the effect of decisions in real time, in terms of cost but also potentially carbon, social and other value criteria..