Sustainability and Green Buildings
Many investors have increasingly embraced green. This has created incentives for builders to design buildings that reduce environmental impacts and promote sustainability. Optimized energy efficiency and a drive for zero carbon emissions have driven innovation in building construction for years.
Reducing waste or recycling old materials is another area where sustainability is helping drive innovation in the construction industry. Organizations like the World Bank have set the pace by developing frameworks such as EDGE to promote green building With these, sustainability is expected to be a key theme in construction going forward.
Predictive Analytics
Every industry is going to be influenced by digital technologies which involve data, machine learning and AI. Predictive analytics combines techniques like data mining, statistics, modeling, machine learning, and artificial intelligence to analyze data and make future predictions.
Predictive data enables design professionals to consider all future factors at play within a region, including local labour rates and material costs. This reduces the gap between planned and actual project budget in spite of the timeframes.
3D printing
3D printing is slowly coming of age. The technology has been breaking record after record over the past few years, advancing in ability to deliver at scale and complexity never seen before.
“3D concrete printing is developing rapidly and relies on different technologies and materials, offering many benefits to its users. The tech is still in its infancy however and is bound by current limitations.”- 3D Natives.
The ability to either prefabricate offsite or directly on-site has obvious labor and material cost benefits over more traditional building methods. It also reduces waste and overcome the limits of human fatigue.
Prefabricated Modules
The use of modular prefabricated modules has been growing in popularity in recent years. Increasingly, components of housing can be manufactured offsite and transported to the site. With more advancements, house building could become more like motor vehicle assembly.
This could birth to an era of house factories, creating a whole new industry. Global forecasts estimate the modular construction market to grow by value up to $157 billion by 2023. In Kenya, the National Housing Corporation is already deploying some prefabs to build houses.
Building Information Modelling (BIM)
This is a process of creating and managing information on a construction project from beginning to end. The technology is now widely adopted by construction industry professionals and many experts believe its adoption is unlikely to slow down in 2020.
BIM is used to represent buildings, roads, and utilities through computer-generated images to help contractors visualize a construction process before it is built. The benefits include streamlined project planning, budget and quality control, and timely delivery.
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