During her time working with the Centre for Digital Built Britain (CDBB) on the National Digital Twin Programme (NDTp), Sharp sought secure and resilient ways of connecting digital twins to deliver the common good, and looked for real examples of people trying to connect data in order to tackle cross-silo issues.
The benefits of a seamless end-to-end digital planning process will be many and wide-reaching.Removing the planning bottleneck: there has been significant progress in digitisation for design and construction, but planning, which sits in the middle, is lagging behind and causing delays.
The UK has huge construction requirements in multiple sectors – the planning process should be an enabler, not a barrier..Considering how much impact planning has on our lives, it is not as present or discoverable as many other aspects of contemporary living.The laminated notices on lamp posts which inform the public of local planning applications can easily be missed or ignored, and are often hard to understand.
We do not have the levels of informed, accessible, public engagement with planning that would benefit the process and the built environment.Digitisation would open up new ways to engage the wider public at all stages of the planning process..
The increasing digitisation of relevant information and data, and our ability to import that data into the planning process in meaningful ways will further help engagement.
Well constructed visual representations make raw data accessible to a wide audience.What’s more, as we move further into a construction Platforms space, we will increasingly see the data set of a design able to talk directly to the manufacturing marketplace.
This means we’ll be able to access instantly both the cost and availability of a project’s components.For example, Xometry, a company in the United States, is already being used by major manufacturers.
Xometry sends the digital file of the required components out to its distributed network of pre-qualified manufacturers all over the USA.They then get a price.