Vishal Singh
Aalto University
Vishal Singh is an Assistant Professor of Building Information Modeling/ Computer Integrated Design and Construction in the Department of Civil Engineering at Aalto University. Vishal leads the Aalto BIM Collaboration, a multi-disciplinary research group with professors from the departments of Civil Engineering, Computer Science, and Industrial Engineering and Management.Vishal’s research combines his expertise in the areas of design thinking and computational thinking, with the aim to develop computational tools and methods to support decision making.
OverviewThis presentation aims to focus on transformative change in the construction sector, and the potential roles, opportunities, and challenges for the academic research community. The presentation is also intended to... [ view full abstract ]
Overview
This presentation aims to focus on transformative change in the construction sector, and the potential roles, opportunities, and challenges for the academic research community. The presentation is also intended to raise and provoke some fundamental questions about the apparent academic research trends and approaches. Is the typical academic research goal bold and flexible enough? Do we need to rethink the research strategy, atleast in part? Is there a likely change on the horizon?
The paper is based on a broad review of the emerging research and development trends across different disciplines, and reflective assessment over the last four years, including thought experiments. Some critical insights on wicked problems in construction, and potential disruptive strategies to deal with them will be presented.
Focus
From a socio-technical point of view, the world seems to be heading into a new world order. Any transformative technical paradigm brings about a systemic and cascading change through the immediate and associated ecosystems. Nonetheless, the effects of industrialization as well as digitalization has so far been much slower in the construction sector when compared to most other sectors.
Several reasons have been posited for the slow transformation of the construction sector, with valid evidence and arguments. Nonetheless, with the increasing maturity of several cutting edge and potentially transformative technical advancements in areas such as the internet of things, augmented and virtual reality, 3D printing, robotics, analytics and machine learning, together with the expanding Building Information Modeling (BIM) ecosystem, there is renewed hope and claims that the construction sector will see a transformative change this time around. Thus, the primary question is, will the construction sector be able to make the transformative leap this time? Most importantly, what can academic research community do about it, when it is unlikely to be business as usual? We present our research strategy and flagship projects.
