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Centre for Digital Built Britain completed its five-year mission and closed its doors at the end of September 2022

This website remains as a legacy of the achievements of our five-year foundational journey towards a digital built Britain
 

The construction and housing industries lag behind most other fields in taking advantage of new technologies. Transforming construction is a social, cultural, economic and political challenge and not just a technical problem. However, most existing research focuses largely on technical aspects and not on the contextual factors that determine their implementation.

Transforming construction through academic research, therefore, requires insights from a social science perspective to analyse the key social, cultural and behavioural factors inhibiting digital uptake in the construction sector and which are holding back transformation across the construction supply chain.

This research intends to understand stakeholders’ interests and attitudes, concepts of value, opportunities and constraints, and the potential impacts on the sector. Therefore, interviews with a wide range of supply chain stakeholders will be undertaken. It will analyse the interactions between technology and digital innovation and the different stakeholders, including those not directly involved in construction, such as local government, planners, financiers and insurers/warranty providers, to understand their role in enabling the transformation of construction through digitisation. It will explore how stakeholder attitudes and strategies, together with their adoption and employment of technology, affect and are affected by, the advancement of new technology.

The research will work with industry partners to identify and test viable solutions to the identified barriers and will include targeted outputs such as guidance to industry, with input from the Construction Leadership Council. It will also gather evidence from successful, and unsuccessful, use cases, seeking to measure outcomes and benefits and the value of such innovation, to provide an evidence-based case to the sector in order to support greater uptake of digital innovation, and to understand challenges and failures.

The project runs through to 2022 and works closely with the Project "Facilitating the digitisation of off-site manufacturing".

Project Investigator: Gemma Burgess

Researchers:

  • Reyhaneh Shojaei
  • Kwadwo Oti-Sarpong
Subject: