However, if reused or upcycled, carbon remains stored offering long-lasting environmental benefits..

Stages of information transfer in design and construction.There are various stages of information involved in the creation of a new building, or an extension of a domestic dwelling.

Architects produce one set of information to one set of criteria, submitting it to planners who then need another, and particular, set of information.From there it goes to the people who might approve the building, or the people constructing the building.In reality, though, all of these people just need slightly different slices of the same information.

If everyone could agree and collect information to the same standards, sharing the same pieces of information upon creation, and when changed, it would unblock the system and lead to significantly greater efficiency..While early BIM slides had a digital thread looping operational data all the way around, in fact there are all sorts of breakpoints.

The handover from construction into operation never works particularly effectively, and we never really get that kind of handover into the capital model.

Planning has always been one of the big digital breaks, where things suddenly go into quite a subjective, painful, and paper based process, and planning has long been held as a blocker to housing, amongst other things.The purpose of digitisation is to facilitate the process by reducing the burden on those people of large amounts of admin and tedious, repetitive tasks that can be done better by machines than humans.. Benefits for architects:.

A digitised planning process will involve a change in the way architects are required to produce some information on their designs, and it will enforce a rigour and consistency in the technical elements of designs (which does not imply or require any constraint on creativity).This is not a huge departure, however: rigour in approach is good practice, and the information required is already largely included in BIM models..

The most significant change for architects will be to free up large chunks of their time to devote to the creative part of their work, which is where they can add the most value (and which is why they became architects in the first place)..Better information for planning officers:.