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VIEWS


23


VIEW POINT


Nigel Ostime of Hawkins\Brown Architects discusses how practices can research and adopt aspects of AI and automation, and thereby stay one step ahead of the robots


A


bout five years ago, two academics from Oxford, Carl Frey and Michael Osborne, produced a seminal report


called ‘The Future of Employment: How Susceptible are Jobs to Computerisation?’ They examined how machines and digital tech might replace humans, covering 702 occupations, including many construction-based ones, ranging from the design team to the site workers. Architects were actually reckoned to have a less than 2 per cent chance of redundancy, but many site-based workers, like brick-laying and dry-lining, were about 80 per cent likely to be redundant, largely due to the dreaded and increasingly ubiquitous robots. However, before we architects got too complacent, a couple of years later father and son duo Susskind and Susskind published ‘The Future of the Professions’, which predicts the decline of pretty much all professions and describes the people and systems that will replace them. In an “internet society,” the authors tell us, we will neither need nor want doctors, teachers, accountants, lawyers – and architects (among many others) to work as they did in the 20th century. The book explains how “increasingly


ADF OCTOBER 2018


capable systems” – from telepresence to artificial intelligence – will bring fundamental change in the way that the “practical expertise” of specialists is made available in society.


So other than sit back and start to see how much we’ve squirrelled away in our pensions, or hope the Government introduces a universal basic income, what should we architects do?


One of my colleagues at Hawkins\Brown, Jack Stewart, has moved from performing a traditional architect’s role, designing and managing projects, to one developing software and writing scripts that can be used in designing buildings and coordinating the digital efforts of the practice as a whole. Tied in with our efforts to raise our skills and experience in design for manufacture and assembly (DfMA) and modern methods of construction (MMC), we hope this will keep us ahead of the curve. So what sort of things is Jack up to?


Coding & cutting Like many practices, Hawkins\Brown has invested heavily in BIM. The benefits of it are now pretty well understood in the industry,


HERE EAST


A 1.2 million square feet creative hub in London’s Stratford, where Hawkins\Brown researches tech including code for optimising design performance


and we are looking for new ways of using it that reach beyond the parametric capabilities and the ability to automate scheduling, costing, programming and so on. So for example we are looking at how data can generate the form. Through coding, not only can we manipulate the data that constitutes our design, but through APIs (Application Programming Interface) and built-in coding interfaces we can also manipulate the capabilities of the software we are using. An API is a software intermediary that allows two applications to talk to each other. As Hawkins\Brown’s Jack Stewart says, “We are no longer at the mercy of the buttons that Autodesk give us – we can build our own!” We are already seeing several projects in the office benefit from this, including the Olympic legacy project Here East in Stratford, east London (pictured above) where we developed a code that allowed us to rapidly ‘optioneer’ unique designs of glass frit patterns for the building facade, whilst fixing the solar control performance. Once a


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