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As time progresses and ushers in vastly increased productivity demands for the construction industry, the use of digital technologies and automation will provide a key solution to facilitating the necessary increases, as well as generating an array of client, end-user and societal benefits.

He says that to get the benefits we’re seeking, all of these other aspects need to be reconciled first, and one of the things that will enable that is productisation.It’s not really “anything to do with DfMA,” he says, or whether it's a panelised, or volumetric or Platform system.

“You're miles away from that if we don't get all of these other ecosystem elements in place to support it.”.Johnston recalls a bathroom pod project early in his own career, where the beautifully designed, millimetre-perfect pods had to be inserted into a traditionally built building.. Aiming for efficiency in such modular projects carries risk..He says that far too much time was spent fixing the gaps between the manufactured and traditional parts.

Whilst the insides of the pods were identical, the outside utility connections were different every single time.Johnston warns of the knock-on effects of these types of scenarios, where a lack of advanced planning results in a total loss of the intended value.. Marks agrees and says the solution lies in bringing the construction site build portion of projects up to the same accuracy as the modules.. Modular construction.

Bringing up the B2 Atlantic Yards project, Amy Marks explains that the problems caused by the module frames not being reset when needed is an easily fixable issue to learn from, not a reason to write off prefab altogether.. For example, lessons learned from the earlier Victoria Hall project in Wolverhampton (which saw tolerance issues between the modules and core structure of the building), did inspire a shift from concrete to structural steel frames on Atlantic Yards.. Further, while she believes it’s possible to achieve tolerances, she says that not every process (ie.

every contract, every scope, every specification) is currently set up for accurate tolerances.But this is exactly the group that convened at Accelerate Data Centres, London, in January 2025..

The density debate.The conversation started by discussing the trends in data centre density..

Driven by the relentless development of CPU and GPU processing power, the need for ever greater power and cooling density at rack level continues to increase exponentially.Data processed has roughly doubled every two years from 2 zettabytes in 2010 to 149 zettabytes in 2024, and the trend continues.