What can an iPhone do on a construction site? Most people only use them for checking email, but I think that there’s something much bigger coming than just allowing people to indulge in their Crackberry addictions while wearing a bright yellow jacket and a safety helmet.
1,001 rooms, 10,000+ drawings
Five years ago, I was working at Foster + Partners on the refurbishment of Her Majesty’s Treasury in London. It was a vast project, with over a thousand rooms and nearly three thousand doors, every single one different because of the building’s complex arrangement and history.
All this work needed to be checked. Were all the light fixtures in place? Was the correct door installed (or removed, for that matter)? Were there any other issues? Taking all the drawings with us to each room to check that it matched the requirements would have been difficult (picture dragging a trolley of large drawings after you room after room, through several floors). So we did the opposite – we took the rooms to the drawings.
Taking the rooms to the drawings
Because of this vast complexity, F+P spent the resources to develop a custom Microsoft Access database that could be used to record the state (or absence) of each of those innumerable fixtures, to track the progress, make notes of problems, and take pictures for reference and illustration. The data (in the form of drawing schedules) was already available electronically, so it just needed to be pulled together and integrated into a single screen that could tell you what you should be checking in the room you were in right now. This was basically a primitive version of BIM (Building Information Model).
We used to spend hours each week combing through the building’s Arabian Rooms, examining its thousands of doors, and snagging the details of each room on a tablet computer running our then state-of-the-art Access application. Back then, tablet computers were the latest and greatest, the “in” thing that was going to revolutionise the industry and bring it into the 21st century. The way I saw it, it was a huge, hot, heavy and power-hungry monster that I had no desire to lug around if I could avoid it.
And yet, to the annoyance of the contractor, we did carry it with us, dutifully recording everything from the absence of light bulbs to incorrect door numbers, snagging every little thing that was not perfect to the Foster standard. We put up with it because it was immensely useful and saved us countless hours of paperwork, and because for this particular project it was simply not possible to do it any other way, due to the building’s complexity.
This was five years ago.
The revenge of the monster tablet
Considering how useful this was, you would think that this technology would be widely used by now. And yet, the building sites that use it are still rare. In part, this is because most projects can’t find the budget for that bit of work to create the snagging application. But the greater issue is the impracticality of carrying that laptop around.
Today’s tablets aren’t so huge and monstrous anymore, but they’re still a pain on most building sites, particularly since they seem to have the uncanny ability to sense when you’re halfway through your site visit and promptly run out of battery.
It doesn’t have to be this way, of course. Smart phones can perform all of the snagging functions of the tablets of yore. Better still, they are much less bulky, they rarely run out of battery, and they can easily integrate photo taking (the Treasury tablets didn’t have cameras, so we had to take the pictures with a separate digital camera and write down the file name into the tablet).
And yet, it seems no one has yet built this snagging application. Perhaps it’s because powerful, useable, wi-fi-connected smart phones with large screens are only just now becoming popular and mainstream enough to warrant it. The iPhone has also shown us that even complicated applications can present a simple, easy to use interface on a mobile device.
What it would look like
You get a call from a potential client. Your phone in your pocket, you go over to the site to meet the client. You create a new job on your phone and start taking pictures and making short verbal notes attached to the pictures. Back in your office, you can then take the time to evaluate the job properly with good information.
Later in the project, you’re doing regular site visits to inspect progress. You spot something going awry, so you take a picture and record a note “There’s a crack in the concrete, and the wrong window is blocked.” This is automatically synced and recorded back in the office (perhaps on a repurposed monster-tablet) and forwarded to the contractor. At another visit, you can simply load up the snag, check that this has been fixed, and mark it off. No need to carry a big folder or have to remember a thousand todo’s.
Once the project is at completion, you’re inspecting the site prior to signing it off for your client. You walk into a room and tell your phone where you are. It brings you a checklist of door handles, light fittings, fire alarms and window requirements. Can you sign off the room? Almost. There’s a light fitting missing and one of the doors has the wrong handle, again. You record them as before and move on, safe in the knowledge that the contractor will hear about them and maybe even fix them before your next visit.
Is this realistic?
To get this sort of tight integration, you’re going to need applications, both on the phone and back in the office, that are specifically tailored for architects. But you don’t need any new technology – all of this is perfectly doable with today’s hardware and with fairly unchallenging software (it’s not rocket science, and it’s all been done before). At the beginning, maybe only large practices will be able to afford this. But over time, I think software companies will look into developing this software and selling it more widely.
The smart phone is going to play a massive role in the industry. Within the next two years, we’ll start seeing a wave of smart phone applications tailored for the construction industry. And if other people don’t do it, maybe we’ll start doing them ourselves at Woobius.
What role do you think smart phones will play in the construction industry? Please post them below.
