Human Talent Matters More Than Ever
As the construction industry enters a new era where automation and digitisation become widespread, the need for diverse human capabilities becomes more essential.
Learning to walk upright, using advanced tools, solving complex problems through brainpower, and working together – these are a few characteristics that helped humans carve out a unique place on the planet.
Our ingenuity has also brought us to a place where we’ve created machines that can out-perform us on many of the physical and mental tasks that our success as a species was built on. This raises the question; ‘what are we for?’
The construction sector is exploring this question more deeply than most. In the not-too-distant future, more of the structures we create will be the output of highly automated factories rather than traditional craft skills. There will be self-driving diggers and plant, and possibly robots laying bricks and plastering walls.
Different Abilities
There will be people employed in the sector – many thousands of them. But most of them will be doing different things and using different abilities. The key tasks will be the ones that we do better than machines. Diversity will matter more than ever.
Change is already happening. Our offsite manufacturing operation is progressively replacing traditional onsite trades with an automated, digitally-designed and controlled factory environment.
The SIPs component building solution we started over 15 years ago now incorporates many more pre-manufactured elements including: windows, cladding, floors and roof cassettes.
Better Solutions, More Precision
In the new era of construction, human ingenuity is designing better solutions while technology delivers a consistent, high-quality product.
In Education for example, our InForm standardised solution sequesters 58% of the embodied carbon over the building’s life. Timber solutions have, on average, 75% less embodied carbon than masonry and metal-based building methods.
The offsite-manufactured component tolerances of InForm achieve improved air tightness of 3m3/hr/m2@50 pascals. Our thermal modelling demonstrates the solution achieves external wall U-value of 0.15W/m2K – reducing energy usage and carbon emissions. The performance and precise tolerances are delivered straight out of the factory.
Humans understanding this detail supports the collaboration that will deliver a sustainable low carbon school estate for future generations.
Residential
Our Flexihome solution has high sustainable timber content to maximise sequestered CO2 and minimise embodied CO2. It combines volumetric components for highly serviced spaces such as kitchens and bathrooms with SIPs in low density spaces – providing extensive practicality and flexibility.
The fabric-first approach and increased Pre-Manufactured Value (PMV) also minimise operational CO2. Osborne investment in production and digitisation at its Coventry offsite facility enables projects to be delivered with 55% and above PMV. This learning has been incorporated into our more recent Purpose-Built Student Accommodation Townhouse design development.
Modernisation of construction still has a long way to go. And there will always be something essentially human needed to apply modern methods intelligently.
The human factors of creativity, collaboration and problem solving are coming to the fore in a rapidly evolving industry. Diversity of thinking matters more than ever as we seek to achieve a better balance of the capability of humans with the capability of machines.
For more information about how Osborne is approaching the new age of construction contact Richard King ([email protected]).
