Event Summary
Innovation in Property | Summary, photos, and slides
From smart toilets to smart meters and Earth Blocks to Energy Houses, Innovation in Property got to the bottom, and even the basement, of the technological trends that are influencing the construction industry today.
Investment in the sector is soaring with £134m a quarter being spent on research and development – but that’s just 1% of UK spend, while construction makes up 6% of the economy. The event was sponsored by WSP and Yardi.
Scroll to the bottom of the story for the event photo gallery.
Building the future
“One of the largest programmes of testing dwellings ever undertaken” is how Dr Will Swan, professor and director of Energy House Labs at the University of Salford, described the university’s Energy House project.
It has seen real houses built inside an empty chamber to maintain laboratory conditions where they can even recreate weather conditions.
Energy House began as a “flight of fancy” but is now a “very rich innovation environment”, according to Swan. He and his team have been testing everything that goes into a house, from curtains and carpets, new materials and building performance, to the electrical control panels of the future. They’re working with big housebuilders like Barratt Homes and Bellway, informing government energy advice, on research such as using smeters – smart meter data – to improve building performance.
Nathan Feddy, chief executive and co-founder of Vector Homes, also emphasised the need for research and said: “We need real independent data to make honest recommendations to our customers.”
He also said the industry needs to invest more to move forward, citing pharma as an example of funding success. When asked by event host Julia Hatmaker, editor of Place North West, what the house of the future looks like, he added: “75% of new builds are still being built with brick and mortar, an inefficient way of building. For me, it’s about standardisation and systemisation in MMC and more being done off-site is the efficient way of doing it.”
Tom Cox, construction solutions director at Saint-Gobain, wants to see tech used more in planning for maintenance, making the comparison of how his car alerts him to the fact it needs an oil change.
Swan started the conference by sharing information about how Energy House 2.0 has provided further insights into sustainability and energy efficiency in housing. Credit: PNW
Putting the consumer first
Swan mentioned smart toilets in jest, as an example of how “we are overengineering certain things and that makes the house harder to use”, though there was support for them when the discussion turned to senior living, thanks to the potential they can offer for early diagnosis of health conditions via analysis of the ‘liquid content’. Other panellists mentioned how honing age-specific technology, like sensors on floors, would benefit this sector.
There was a lot of discussion around building control apps – their benefits and their complications – and Swan added: “Ask people how they use energy and it’s so variable. People are all different – and then there are those who leave things on all the time! We need to understand consumers better and the variations between different households. What does this mean for the late adopter [of technology] or those who can’t adopt because they can’t afford to?”
Vector Homes’ Nathan Feddy, Saint Gobain’s Tom Cox, and University of Salford’s Will Swan spoke with Place North’s Julia Hatmaker about their work at Energy House. Credit: PNW
Can the infrastructure cope?
Cox said: “If you treat the unit and the project as an energy flexible entity, you actually reduce the size of the grid connections that are required for the house because you can balance the use of energy within the project and into the larger grid.
“It’s very much like Octopus are doing – they are taking energy when it’s being produced, they are storing it, and they are buffering grid peaks and troughs by using those two different sources of energy.
“We can do that at a local level in the house by using that whacking great battery, which can be sat on your drive not doing much, as part of the energy system in the house. We are exploring that with building management systems.”
While Willmott Dixon is experimenting with AI, Jill Guthrie said the firm was being cautious about how it used the technology. Credit: PNW
Using AI
An audience vote showed around half of those attending said they were using AI in their day-to-day business, but panellists were keen to point out that the technology isn’t new, and it is actually hyper-local. Some of the earliest examples were created in Manchester by mathematician Alan Turing.
Josh Sykes, technical director at WSP, said machine learning, such as large language models, had been around for 20 years, while the likes of Netflix feed us with suggestions using AI on a daily basis.
He added: “I am more interested in how we can use AI in design to get us closer to an optimised solution.”
Amit Puri, head of technical solutions at Autodesk Construction EMEA, said systems like Microsoft’s Copilot and ChatGPT were “game changers” for daily tasks such as summarising emails and meeting notes.
Victoria Hughes-Barker, professional support lawyer at Mills & Reeve, said they were also trialling Copilot but, as a very risk-averse business, it was only being used for support work, not for anything client-focused.
Jill Guthrie, principal digital and compliance manager for Willmott Dixon, discussed testing Creo CAD software as an estimating tool and as a way of scanning buildings to identify early warnings on project delays.
Professor Richard Kingston joked with Place North’s Julia Hatmaker about the origination of AI at the event, including why Manchester deserves more credit than America for it. Credit: PNW
Will AI replace us all?
Hughes-Barker thinks not. She said: “I think there is a need for a human brain and always will be. AI is only as good as its source material.”
She also outlined how there is currently no specific UK legislation in relation to AI, which could cause problems with things like insurance. And she cautioned: “Don’t put anything on there that you wouldn’t write on a wall outside.”
Guthrie said one of the biggest issues for the construction industry would be if something got missed, for example in a building scan: “There has to be a responsibility. If there’s a problem, what happens?”
Professor Richard Kingston of The University of Manchester, and director of NERC Digital Solutions Programme, talked of how AI can speed processes up, but said that in a niche industry focus is needed: “You can take one LLM and customise it, then train it on your specialist data. You can run on your own machine, completely disconnected from the internet.” But he warned: “This is an assistant. It shouldn’t be there to make decisions for you.”
Puri talked of the pluses and minuses – how regulation can stifle growth, yet there is a responsibility with regard to bias or discrimination: “It [AI] doesn’t have the reasoning you do.”
Autodesk’s Amit Puri spoke about the ways AI can help save time on various tasks – whether that be on building projects or racecar designs. Credit: PNW
Creating efficiencies
Sykes described a challenging project at Manchester’s Mayfield Park where his team had to manage changes in legislation, issues with embodied carbon and architectural constraints. Thanks to AI, he said: “In two weeks we got close to something [a solution]. Historically, we couldn’t have done that but we got the design on a really strong footing using some great analysis.”
Home building is at the top of the government’s agenda and Kingston outlined one of his programmes of work to create a nationwide system to identify where houses should be built, what type of homes they should be, and what the identified areas would look like in 2050 – in terms of flood risk and so on.
Sykes also said using data presented a “massive opportunity” to create better building control systems.
Puri detailed a non-construction project, working with a Formula 1 team, to improve a part on one of its vehicles: “Our solution enabled Mercedes in 48 hours to do what would have previously taken six weeks.”
In relation to property and predictive insights, he added: “We are taking data and providing information to reduce risk and identify that risk earlier.”
With an Earth Block proudly on display, Bennett Associates’ Aidan Lonsdale spoke about how his practice had been utilising the sustainable building material. Credit: PNW
Back to brick
Adrian Lonsdale, associate director at Bennetts Associates, closed the event with a presentation that featured age-old technology being brought up to date to the benefit of the environment. He showcased Earth Blocks, one of his company’s innovations in low-carbon design. They take subsoil direct from the construction site, blend it with sand, and use straw to bind it. It eliminates the need to send waste to landfill, and pay the tax that goes with it. The blocks also bring climatic benefits to the building, regulating temperature and humidity and trapping airborne pollutants.
The long-term bonus is that they are endlessly recyclable, and they have 10% of the carbon of a traditional concrete block. Lonsdale said: “In deconstruction, there is no depletion. You can reconstruct them or they go back to the earth.”
Earth Blocks have just been used in the basement of London’s Tribeca development, while another of Bennetts Associates’ innovations, straw-insulated panels, have been used in the construction of a pavilion at the Manchester Fashion Institute, part of Manchester Metropolitan University.
Innovation in Property was sponsored by WSP and Yardi. Credit: PNW
What’s next?
Join Place North at one of our upcoming events:
Offices + Workspace | 10 October
Yorkshire Industrial & Logistics | 15 October
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