The future of construction, lessons from SpaceX

As part of my McKinsey 12 Disruptors impacts on the property industry I wrote about the impact of advanced materials, robotic construction and 3D printing. Fanciful school boy dreams maybe but in an industry that has a lot more money than construction some of these ‘Tony Stark’ dreams are coming true.

Image from treehugger.com

Elon Musk is involved in lots of startups, lots of companies and comes up with some amazing ideas and through his work at SpaceX he has honed those dreams into combining 3D design, motion sensing interaction and 3D printing of titanium parts to new heights. The video in the treehugger article is a must watch for awesome nerds and normal people alike.

So what does it mean for the construction?

Treehugger sums up the resource efficiency impacts really well “All manufacturing is about moving large quantities of atoms around. This takes energy, and there’s waste. But we can imagine a future where there’s a lot less material waste because 3d printers only use the amount of stuff they need, thus using a lot less energy.”

Absolutely, resources will become more and more constrained in the future as we push the boundaries of our one planet limitation.

But it will also change the way that we interact and participate in the development of our communities, cities and buildings. Imagine the impact of being able to interrogate and manipulate the design of the building before it gets built, right up until the last minute before the part gets 3D printed on site.

With your Google glasses you can walk onto site part way through construction, pull up the construction element that is being fixed next, manipulate it in real time, modify it and do a final clash check before it gets printed in the basement.

No more waste, no more variation claims because of a last minute change, no more cost overruns? Sounds awesome.

Disruptive Tech Property Industry Impact – 3D Printing

The eighth in the series and maybe my favourite in the McKinsey & Company 12 disruptive technologies – 3D Printing. I have posted about 3D printing a couple of times over the last 6 months. It has the potential to change many things – design, reduce waste, allow home fixing, and now maybe even pizza.

But what about the property industry?

3D printing in design

This one is fairly obvious. 3D printing can help architects and engineers to rapidly prototype scale models of buildings and details at each design stage. The technology has already been adopted by architectural firms such as Hassell in Sydney.

The next evolution 3D printing in design will be printing on a much larger scale. Imagine being able to produce 1:1 scale models of facade details, door handles, chairs, desks. Love it.

3D printing in construction

Now, without going as far as predicting that we will have a giant humongous 3D printer that would print the whole building in one go, although that would be awesome, I can imagine more onsite creation of parts becoming prominent over the next 20 years.

With the advent of 3D CAD and BIM more and more of our buildings all our buildings are designed and documented in 3D. So its not too far a stretch of the imagination to think about 3D printing becoming more prevalent in the construction of buildings.

It may see a much greater reduction in the transport miles of many of our building products before they reach site. Rather than the raw material being shipped to one country, made in another and then shipped to another country where the building it being constructed we may see portable 3D printing warehouses that fit into shipping containers being moved to a construction site. That way only the raw material is being transported.

It may also give us less construction waste on site. If the parts of the building can be manufactured on site specific to the site requirements we may see less need to reorder parts or less need to tweak the part before it will fit.

3D printing in property management and refurbishment

Now this would allow another level of uniqueness to buildings. At the moment we tend to go for standard off the shelf solutions for cost of construction but also for the continued maintenance and operation of the building.

Imagine if it was just as quick to replicate your one-off designed door handle from the original BIM model as it was to source a replacement door handle off the shelf. It would take away all the risk of
uniqueness!

I can imagine Gehry’ness or Starck’ness creeping into even the most frugal of buildings in the future, now that would make an alternative future!

Every architect should have one of these

Ever wondered what to do with all the plastic waste that you get in your office? Always wished you could recycle 3D models? Awesome new invention allows all this to happen in your office.

The advent of 3D printing for architectural firms opens up many possibilities for testing details, connections and concept designs. You can now get desktop printers such as this one from Formlabs that means you can 3D print at your desk!

But what about the environmental impact of all the plastic used to produce the 3D models? What do you do with the 3D prints that don’t quite work the first time, or models you no longer need? Well a clever guy in the US has come up with a solution.

Filabot produces the filament (think of filament as the ink the 3D printer needs). Filabot takes all types of plastic, old models, PET bottles (mainly soft drinks), HDPE bottles (milk bottles) and ABS (kids toys, lego, luggage) melts them down and then extrudes them into filament.

Put both of these together and you have the ability to repurpose waste plastic into 3D models. Innovation means cutting out the unnecessary and this cuts out unnecessary waste from 3D printing.

Imagine the possibilities of being able to quickly, cheaply and responsibly produce 3D models for the built environment!

Will 3D printing reduce our products eco-footprint?

Staples will be offering in store 3D printing in Europe early next year.

You’ll be able to upload your 3D design to the Staples server and pop into the store later on to pick up your 3D object.

It will cut out the need for distribution, logistics, storage, and lots of middle men. But it will mean that you will be likely driving on your own to Staples to pick up one item, rather than a big truck picking up many thousand items.

It also opens all all sorts of ideas around individuals buying designs for products rather than buying products themselves. Which again completely changes the logistics and distribution process, as well as the challenges of patents and intellectual property.

Maybe, it could also help in the reduction of waste. Maybe we could work out how a kids toy has broken, take a 3D photograph of the bit that has broken, convert that 3D photo into a 3D design that gets uploaded and printed at Staples. We can then repair the toy or radio or mouse that has broken rather than chucking it away and buying a new one.

So if we see a similar rapid acceleration in 3D printing as we have with smart phones and tablets, this bold first step by Staples could be game changing for our manufacturing and associated industries.