There was a lot to digest from last week's Fabrication Gap Symposium - so much so that it took me the whole weekend! Thanks a lot for Wolf Mangelsdorf, Fabian Scheurer, Wolfgang Rieder, Viviana Muscettola and everyone else for organising and contributing to 2 days fully focused on industrialising construction.
Some key learnings, many of which reinforce what we are trying to do at Modulize:
- From Projects to Products: Can we ever move from construction being a series of one-off projects to where buildings become repeatable products? And should this even be the ambition? While this was the framing in one of the oft cited McKinsey reports, there seemed to be broad consensus that this is the wrong framing. Construction projects will continue to be projects, and we should rather work towards developing products that can help more efficiently deliver those projects (like well defined panelised systems).
- Standardisation vs. alignment: We probably shouldn't try to fully standardise all components made in factories. We don't need to have just a few rigidly defined wall panels that everyone then has to design their projects with. This seems neither realistic, nor does it set us up to deliver a liveable built environment. Instead, we need to create alignment between fabricators, customers and projects, and make sure we leverage well defined interfaces between products and rather create standards e.g. at the data and information exchange level.
- Interfaces: Related to both the idea of products making up projects and whether and how to standardise, one consistent call to action was that we have to solve interfaces. If we cannot plan for products playing nicely together once they get to the construction site, we simply do not have a clear path to close the fabrication gap that prompted the symposium to be organised in the first place
- Risks, real or perceived: Risk is one of the key drivers for so many decisions in the AEC industry. More than once during the event, the question came up which of the risks we care about are real risks, which are perceived, and which risks should actually take such prominence in driving our decisions. We need to find ways to solve risk ownership in a more collaborative manner, rather than looking at it as something that needs to be packaged and pawned off to the next stakeholder in the value chain.
We covered much more ground during the symposium, and while many people agreed that the industry shouldn't wait for some Elon Musk moment to flip construction on its head, I do hope that we can be inspired to think big and, as Fabian put it in his keynote, have at least a hint of revolution in our actions. It's high time, and the massive challenges we're facing aren't waiting around for us to tackle them!
As the cherry on top, I got a chance to see the bricklaying robot from wienerberger and KM Robotics in action - thanks to Meysam for taking me along!
#prefabrication #modularconstruction #industrializedconstruction
