Lack of IT cements housing crisis

In his Budget speech, Gordon Brown blamed the housing market for most of the past 50 years of “stop-go” problems in the British economy.

Certainly, the messy, delay-prone construction sector accounts for eight percent of British GDP. It’s time, therefore, for IT professionals to ask if their oh-so-modern industry can raise productivity in the oh-so-backward building trade.

There has been some progress. Not long ago, the mobile phone was the hot new device on the construction site. Now, it has become as common as a pencil or a tool belt. The next step will be the adoption of Tablet PCs.

So far, Microsoft’s innovative platform, launched in 2002, has found only modest numbers of buyers. But in construction the story could be different. Microsoft’s screen, after all, digitises a pen’s movements and displays them as handwritten text or drawn sketches. Handwriting-recognition software can translate script into text. The user can draw at various scales or within a developing 3D model of a building, while having an entire portfolio of documents available to cut and paste. When more construction professionals work on site with digital cameras, the potential of Tablet PCs will be even clearer.

With the Tablet PC, taking notes, sketching and commenting on drawings while walking around rubble are all possible. Using a digital pen, and drawing directly on screen, feels quite similar to using paper. There seems to be little reason for execs in suits and hard-hats to buy a conventional notebook PC when, for about the same price, a Tablet PC can be bought.

But if the professional lacks the technical or creative capacity to specify or draw on the spot, Tablet PCs will not help to speed construction. They are wonderful automated clipboards, but will not replace the need for coordinated project information before work starts on-site.

There are also drawbacks with the use of Tablet PCs for the processing of architectural blueprints. They cannot easily be gathered round, the way drawings on a carpenter’s workbench can. Only one page can be viewed at any time – it’s hard to see several plans or elevations at once. Their electronic zoom capabilities help, but tend to make users lose the big picture.

Tablet PCs and IT in general cannot act as a panacea to bring UK construction out of the 19th century and into the 21st. The same is true with computer aided design (CAD). CAD should make it easy to borrow or originate architectural ideas and collectively develop them into built form. Yet the reality of teamworking in offices today reduces many architects to the role of CAD monkeys.

No, IT can’t by itself modernise building processes. But a disciplined attitude to applying IT, taking a leaf from the mass-production world of the car industry, would do much to solve Britain’s housing crisis.