This article describes a workshop process which was used to investigate trends of structural design. The final aim was to find out new business areas utilizing new technology. At first, scientific literature and commercial publications of companies which are analyzing such trends were studied through. Then, the trends were tabulated with the parties of construction sector. The table was used to find out needs and problems of customers and possible solutions for them. Trends were analyzed in workshop from the point of view of a structural design company.
The result of the workshop was a list of evaluated ideas. The whole list is not published here because the content of it is not scientifically relevant. The result of the workshop has also been completed afterwards with technologies the participants were not familiar with.
The results published here are description of the process, the best ideas of the generated list and ideas, which were selected to be developed after one year of evaluation. The result of the following realization was that by quick evaluating it was not possible to forecast which ideas will materialize. Still, a suitable list of ideas was obtained by evaluating, which can be analyzed and tested further. Two main technologies are now under development after one year of the workshop are virtual reality and machine learning in the company in question.
Keywords: Trends, civil engineering, construction sector, building information model (BIM), structural design.
