Obsolescence, Engineering and the way ahead
To remain on top of the game, industries need to adapt to technological advancements, or else obsolescence is inevitable. And in the construction industry, fear of obsolescence is REAL.
Today engineering is making life comfortable and efficient throughout the world and beyond. But to remain on top of the game, the Construction and Infrastructure industry needs to adapt to technological advancements at a faster pace, or else obsolescence is inevitable.
So before rushing to the elephant in the room let’s set up a baseline and later we will build on it. Engineering and Technology go hand in hand, so let’s first understand these terms and their relative meaning.
Engineering is a profession of creative application of scientific principles to design or develop solutions for day-to-day problems. Engineers use technology (augmented with maths and science) as a tool to perform their job. But, one of the misconceptions being - technology only refers to programming, robotics, automation, and Computer science.
Actually, That’s been an outcome of an industrial norm. The definition of technology shifts to align itself with the trending industry; that’s how it becomes a synonym of the trending domain. But the generic definition of technology is the scientific knowledge and/or equipment that is needed for a particular industry. And the generic tools are maths and science.
Every industry starts with basic technological shifts for the most part of its primary development. Later that is superseded by further developments. With time it becomes an industrial standard. The industry starts to compound on that technological advancements/investment right from the primary development stage. And the faster the pace of adaptation, the more the rate of growth in the sector. Domains that keep on investing in the compounding of technology reaps the harvest i.e. emergence as the most technologically advanced sector. And finally, that sector becomes the synonym of Technology.
Now, let’s address the elephant in the room - The Construction sector (majorly of the developing nations)
Civil engineering is a domain with very extensive exposure to different sections of engineering. And when we talk especially about the construction industry is a very physically involved and alive industry. Construction and Infrastructure is a Money & Manpower hungry sector. Due to its mammoth size, small errors can cause huge losses, which results in very little room for experimentation. Some of the indirect repercussions are -The construction industry has been very slow to adopt the new advancements. Technological compounding particularly in this sector has been slow. You will often hear people say that the civil engineering domain particularly construction hasn’t changed much over the years.
But not everything is going down here. The Construction industry employs some of the best creatively clever minds who invent, design, and build things with a strive to solve real-world problems. The three key focus that is always kept in mind in civil engineering projects is COMFORT and SAFETY and EFFICIENCY.
Civil engineers cleverly used some technological advancements of other industries to optimize their day-to-day job. These nowadays became the keystone for industrial standards in the construction realm. Tools like BIM, AutoCAD, Revit, ETABS, Staad Pro, Primavera are very much needed for project optimization. Electronic tools like GPS, total station, drone technology are doing miracles in data collection and supervision. GIS and Mapping tools are helping us to figure out complex supply chain-related issues. These are the very tools that are needed to upgrade ourselves for the industry.
The world will always need engineers to solve next-generation problems. And civil engineers are always called upon to address societal needs on a number of scales with a unique blend of technology and science.
We will discuss more regarding the way forward for the civil engineering domain in my next post (Next Thrusday: Stay tuned). In correlation with this, we will also focus on two key emerging concepts that will be the next frontier for Civil engineers.
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