Transcript: Can We Incentivize More Trust with Collaboration in Design?

We have such an ingrained and deep legacy in terms of how we've gone about things in the past. If we're talking in terms of trying to redesign that, I just don't think that's possible. And this is all bound up in the management process and hierarchy, hierarchical management structures which we have at the moment. What BIM, what blockchain has this possibility to build a design and construction community where they know that there's the possibility of trust and being involved right from the shop floor up to the director board level in decision making in arriving at consensus, but also to achieve a reward for that.

It's that idea of being able to incentivize people to work together, to collaborate together. And if we provide the technologies and an enlightened client, then when those things merge and mesh together, we're on the cusp, I think, of what is called for consistently within our business of culture change to reinvent construction industry. Maybe the Bitcoin building would be done with blockchain. I don't think anybody owns Bitcoin. I think that's what makes it great.

But we could build a building in its honor using Bitcoin as payment. Yeah, maybe. I like this idea. And reach consensus on its design. And we'll put a bunch of miners in the basement to help fund it.

But we would have to make sure that it is net positive because we don't want to use that much energy. We're going to be using the transparent solar panels on all the windows and out on the street, out on the sidewalks as well, the part where as you push down on it, it generates electricity. The piezo. I love this idea. It's all coming together.

We'll put it on the bay as well so that we can generate wind energy and wave energy to help fund it. We're going to be so negative in net zero that all the other buildings won't equal what we just give away. Hello and welcome to the Constructor Podcast, the future of the built environment. I'm your host Brittany Campbell-Turner and this podcast is dedicated to helping property owners have certainty in their decisions about the construction projects. We talk about fostering trusting relationships, help you to understand how to lower risk, on schedule and most importantly, exceed your end user's desires.

Welcome to this episode of the Constructor Podcast. Last week I spoke with Anthony Day, COO of EMEA Blockchain Lab, Jacob Borsma, who's the Netherlands blockchain team leader and Jan Willem Stanting, product owner for Smart Buildings blockchain proposition, all at Deloitte. We talked about connecting with collaborative technologies in order to improve business decisions, including well-being, talent acquisition, and last but not least, we discussed the opportunity for blockchain and construction in real estate. We also covered the realities of blockchain use with BIM and Axie, a real estate blockchain solution that Deloitte is working on.

If you haven't listened to that episode yet, check it out at constructor.com slash Deloitte Innovation. In today's episode, I had the pleasure of having a really fun conversation and a co-host. My co-host is Bill Dewebeck, host of the BIM Thoughts Podcast, and we interviewed Maliki Matthews, who is the senior lecturer in the School of Architecture, Technological University in Dublin, and he's the leader for BIM blockchain and collaborative teaching and learning. His research includes BIM pedagogy, BIM anthropology, BIM and blockchain, student critical thinking skills around BIM technologies and processes, and interdisciplinary collaboration, learning experiences using the BIM model.

Naturally, I thought of Bill when planning for this podcast with Maliki because he's done so much research around BIM. So I invited him to come on so that we can do a little bit of a crossover and co-hosting magic here. With that, Bill and I discuss with Maliki some of his most notable research. Listen in. Uh oh, there's the red button.

Here we go. Recording here, Brittany Campbell-Turner, Bill Dewebeck, and Maliki Matthews on the line. So today we're talking about BIM and blockchain. And first things first, Bill and I are investigating BIM and blockchain separately. Bill more so BIM, me more so blockchain, but the two collide quite often and they should.

So we've invited Maliki to talk with us about why he thinks they should collide regularly. So Maliki, could you just share a little bit about your background? Yeah, certainly. Well, I've had quite an eclectic background. My academic education would have been in architectural technology here in Dublin, where I actually teach.

I'm back teaching on the course that I originally qualified from, and that's something I never in a million years would have thought would have happened. So that was one of the nice things that did happen to me. When I qualified, we were in the middle of the first of a recession here in Ireland. So I actually ended up contracting and working between here in Ireland and the UK for an Irish contractor, heavy civil engineering. I was really interesting.

I did that for 10, 11 years or so. In the late 80s, I started to get interested in CAD, pursued that by myself while working for the contractor. The circumstances changed and business picked up a little bit. So I decided it was time to get back into architecture. I spent the next 10, 12 years working for, at first, some private architectural firms.

And then I went into the public, local public authority here and worked there for 10 years An opportunity arose from that because I developed a specialism in CAD and BIM, particularly Revit, started knocking on the door around that point. So having done, again, another diploma bachelor's course in computer studies, this all started to make sense to me. And I started to follow up on the Revit, which led to an opportunity to do some part-time teaching in the School of Architecture in the Dublin Institute of Technology, which led to an opportunity to take a full-time job there.

And that's where I've been for the last 11 years. I would have been responsible for the introduction of BIM and Revit into particularly the architectural technology course early on in around 2008 or so, something for which some of my colleagues are still not have forgiven me because it's a struggle. It's a disruption and it requires change and requires adapting new methods and new ways of going about what we have done the past 10, 20, 50 years or so. So that's where I am now. Don't they know that anything that you're scared of is worthwhile?

I like that. Well, that would always seem exciting to me, but I suppose other people view that differently. I've yet to have a job where it's been one of the better jobs I've had where I wasn't scared out of my wits when I started. Well, I suppose what we do is teach fantastic students. They come into college 18 years old, fresh minds, and there's no legacy holding them back.

They embrace this, they adopt it, they see it, and they run with it. And the kind of things they're doing now is just extraordinary, fantastic stuff. It's fun, though. Oh, great fun. It's fun to see all the great stuff that comes along that you never thought you would see or thought, man, I wish I would have thought of that.

Yeah. My fourth year students do a dissertation and there's quite a wide variety of subjects that they take and some students take a Revit and they push it. Particularly now with the introduction of Dynamo and visual scripting and the kind of stuff they're pushing out now. I think it's just industry leading. It's tremendous stuff.

I have one student this year that developed a methodology of using the model for dispute avoidance and dispute resolution. Wow. A whole set of Dynamo scripts which allow him to, if you like, assign responsibility in terms of who did what and when, which is interesting. That's garnering some great interest here with the Law Society of Ireland. I just stand back in amazement when I see these kids take that type of stuff on.

It's wonderful. Especially that kind of stuff. I would have thought they'd get into cool stuff like generative design or something like that. Yeah. Not that legal stuff isn't cool for all the lawyers out there to assume me.

Well I think so because the lawyers, I think, are standing very much on the outside of a process. They're finding it difficult, not necessarily to understand, but to dig into, to drill into. One of the advantages of something like this is that it allows them entry into the model and showing them what the model can actually do from their perspective. It's a question of data and what could you do to understand it at this point? And then what can you use the data for?

And so you talked about dispute avoidance. Just having had this conversation about, obviously blockchain, there's a lot of question about auditability and things like that. I think what I'd like to ask you, since I've read your white paper, Malaki, is about BIM. Just at a high level. There's building information modeling and there's building information management.

And I think there's an interesting way to cover that subject. A lot of times when we think about BIM, it's the tech. It's the 3D modeling. But it's a much bigger subject than that. So if we can talk about that, that'd be, I think, a fun subject.

Yeah, certainly. I much prefer the definition of BIM as building information management than the building information modeling. I talk about to my students what I call the Rubicon moment when you're learning an application like Revit. What it is, when that realization comes up, what you're actually doing is programming a database. Now it's visual information that's coming back to you.

When you make that realization that you're programming a database, then all sorts of new things can happen and all sorts of exciting prospects are there in front of you in terms of how you're inputting that data and then extracting the data. And our design and construction industry is multifaceted and complex. And a lot of people look at BIM and have different definitions for it. And that's fine because each professional domain looks at it from their perspective and defines it from their perspective. So when you're actually creating a building information model for building information management, you've got to take into account that fact that you're creating it for, in essence, other people to use.

That should govern how you go about a strategy of creating that visualized database that various people are going to collaborate and contribute to and extract information from. That's a big realization, but an exciting one. Yeah, collaboration is key for sure. I've been writing this down, believe it or not, I don't type it out. These definitions of the BIM.

And so programming a database, to me, that's management. Virtually building the building is modeling. That's how I distinguish the two different camps. Are you virtually building the building or are you programming a database for management? I think it's the inseparable build.

But when you start to learn a program like Revit, you're not conscious of the fact that that's what you're actually doing. What you're conscious of is trying to, first of all, design a building, then to technically design it as well. You're going to have inputs from probably immediately the structural engineer and other people as well. It's a very thought provoking exercise that I do with some of my students. I say, now step out of your architectural shoes and step into a structural engineer shoes or a quantity surveyor, people over here who do the estimating.

Now look back at your design and see what way you might have done things differently because people will read information because they require information at different times and to a different scale and a different methodology in terms of even constructing a wall. A quantity surveyor looks at a wall and he's looking at three different pricing structures, you know, below ground up to the waist level and then anything above that. When you're constructing a wall as an architectural designer, that's what it is. It's a wall. You mentioned from the perspective of other designers, the quantity surveyors, but what about the builder?

Think about it from the perspective of the builder. That obviously leads me into a stream of consciousness that relates to lean construction and integrated project delivery and who's planning the work and is that happening during design. But I don't want to rant here. We don't want to. What's that, Bill?

We don't want you to rant. Oh, I like to rant. Rant away. Rant away. Well, I do think though, whenever I think about BIM in the UK sense, I always think about pass 1192 and how that was grounded and lean methodologies and it's a process.

BIM is not just a technology and in the process itself to have the right information at the right time to essentially get the job done most effectively. And I think that all of that's wrapped up in this conversation about modeling versus management. Yeah, I would most certainly agree with that. You know, it's interesting that you mentioned the contractors there because I think BIM in terms of being a disruptive technology has most certainly influenced, in my opinion, the contractors more than the professional designers. And I suppose because they deal on the basis of time and money and the advantages that BIM brings to a construction job are all based around time and money.

So it's well worthwhile for a contractor on particular jobs to take the information from the designers in whatever format they come, you know, PDF, Oracad, even Revit models, even BIM models. But they'll take those and they'll start again from scratch and build that model again. Now, I know that sounds terribly totally working and whatever, but they do this specifically because they're building it from their perspective. They are immediately gaining advantages in terms of programming, in terms of phasing, in terms of what needs to be done on site and what can be done off site.

And also a little thing that has arisen over the last 12 months that I've noticed here as well, and again, because it comes down to the way the contract has been formulated, is that they're pre-building claims as well, because the miscommunicated information, the other problems that we have in terms of non-collaboration or over-the-wall information that has been described when it arrives at the contractor, it's well worth him investing, you know, 30, 40, 50 grand to get his team to build this model from his perspective. And by doing that, because it is so detailed and it's, you know, one of the main advantages is trying to solve problems before you get out onto site.

But if that coordinated work is not done by the designers first, you've been guaranteed that the contractors will find that. Now, it's not the right way to do BIM, but if we're going to be static at BIM level 2, as defined in PAS 1192 in the UK, that's a problem. That exists, that's there. And meanwhile, the contractors are forging ahead in terms of their use of this technology. That can be a problem for other domains.

I think what also influences the contractors running with particular design information and having the ammunition to do a claim or to start a dispute, if you will, with the designers is the level of design and the lack of clarity the designers have at times when they're putting together their designs. That's something that actually I got involved with a project late and we had to do clothes out for the project. And this is actually what took place. The contractors ran with the design without understanding what level of due diligence the designers took into account.

They had change ordered as a result, plenty of change orders. It seems weird to me, though, that we would be talking about litigation as a profit center for the contractors when we would want to build these buildings in the interest of building owner to try to get it done on time and on budget. So to me, the contractor taking the time to rebuild the building in whatever software they decide to build it in virtually is saving time and effort and energy and money for the building owner.

And at the end of the job, they've got a happy building owner, a happy architect and a happy partnership. And hopefully they build more buildings together. Am I seeing this incorrectly? No, no, Bill, I would absolutely agree with you there. I think that's what we're aiming for when we move from, again, the UK definition into what they defined as BIM level three, where you have this real collaborative sense.

And there's not so much that central model that people are working on. What it is, is a group of design and construction professionals with a brief from a client and a set of information requirements clearly set out and a goal in terms of delivering a building for a certain price in a certain time. That to me is the ultimate goal. But we're a little bit way off that, certainly here on this side of the pond. That's a pity because you're using the technologies.

OK, I've gone to so many conferences where people have stood up and said, yes, we're doing BIM level two, this, that and the other. And I can tell straight away, you're not, pal. I'm not going to stand up and embarrass you in front of these 120 people, but I know you're not. So that neatly brings us around to that problem that I started to look into in terms of my research. And it's based around collaboration and it's based around people who want to work together, who have a mindset that they're tired of the way things have been done and they want to work together.

They want to do exactly as you said, they're built to cure a building for a client and make that client happy so that he'll come back looking for you and your services again. So there's something that we have to do to make that happen. And I have my doubts in terms of the current methodologies and the current set up, particularly certainly the current contracts because as far as I can see, the contracts are set up for litigation straight away. You know, when you've got that element of causation, like who's the last man standing, who's got the best insurance that I go after.

And we've taken a little leap beyond that now. I had a lovely scenario where I brought a construction lawyer into a master's class I was delivering on collaborative design and showed this lawyer some of the work that we've been doing and how we had an architect, a technologist, a mechanical engineer, electrical engineer, construction manager, all working together to design and construct and produce a set of documentation on a building. And she was horrified. I said, what's the problem here? She says, well, are you telling me that everybody is working on this design together?

And I said, yes. And she said, well, who am I going to blame? You know, if there's a problem, who am I going to go after here? I said, well, that's exactly why you're here because now you need to change your methodologies in terms. You know, the BIM table is a round table.

In the traditional sense, we've always had the rectangular table and the project manager or the architect is always sat up the top. But in the BIM process, it's a round table so that there's a seat for everybody that is necessary on that table, including, in my opinion, the construction lawyer. They should be in right from the start in terms of assessing risk and providing advice to the collaborative in order to avoid litigation and problems. And I don't see why the client wouldn't pay a few bob to have a construction lawyer there if they're going to add to that process.

Well, let's get into this blockchain thing because I'm going to be honest, I don't know much about it. I've heard about it, but I don't know much about it at all. If that's okay, Pritani, I'll do that from my perspective here. I started to get interested in blockchain about, oh gosh, 24 months ago, two years plus. How I started to get interested in it was I'm doing a PhD at the moment in the social human reaction and aspects of collaborative BIM technologies.

And it became very evident to me that one of the main problems we have in our industry is based around trust. So I started to drill into the whole area to see if I could find a model of trust that might be used within a collaborative, multidisciplinary building design, construction collaborative. I couldn't find anything. There was just nothing there within the AEC industry. So I said, well, there's got to be something outside of the industry.

So I stepped outside the industry and there was a collision of language between blockchain and what I was looking for based around trust, based around collaboration, based around digital technologies. You didn't say transparency. Were you getting around to that? And transparency and immutability. I said, oh, well, here, this is interesting.

So I started to read, or as I like to describe it, I stood on the edge of the rabbit hole and said, oh, I'm going to jump in here, probably not to emerge for a few years. And I said, yeah, here goes, let's go. So that's what I've done. I've not emerged as yet. I'm still reading and researching into that whole area.

But when I started to compare from my BIM, from my perspective, if you like, on blockchain, some very interesting synergies started to arise. And one of the phrases that I developed was this idea of a scaffold of trust. And if we're working together, it's very easy for me to say, I trust you and you trust me. But in order to help that trust along, it would be wonderful if I could see evidence of your trust and if you could see evidence of my trust as well.

And the billing information model provides another database of value transactions. If that can be tied into the blockchain where those value transactions are agreed by consensus and then locked away so that they become immutable and the whole BIM model, the whole database starts to become a single source of truth. Now, if that's the case, then very interesting things start to happen in terms of your collaboration. And that is how I delved into this whole area. And I'm still swimming around in the blockchain sea.

Bill, do you feel like you understand blockchain? I understand it a little bit. It's starting to make sense to me. I started reading about it probably six months ago or so, but haven't really had any meaningful conversations about it. If I may give my perspective on how I became interested in it, that might help too.

The elements of having the distributed ledger, that the data that is added to the network, it's always verified by consensus of a certain portion of the network. Say for instance, Bitcoin, the most popular and known blockchain, it's 51% of the blockchain. They need to have consensus and agree to the fact that this transaction actually took place, I found was interesting. In addition to that, the immutability, nothing really can change. But the thing that really stuck out to me, Bill, was the idea of a smart contract.

What a smart contract is, it's you have that addition of a transaction to the blockchain network. Obviously, you still have the verification process, but you have a condition that's attached to it. So for instance, if I submit an RFI to you, a request for information, and I want for you to send me back information in order for a change order to automatically be created as a result based upon my response, I can build that into that RFI contractual language. Really the coding, it's not really contractual at all.

But I can build that into the coding so I can have a number of steps doing if then that in the smart contract. When I understood that that transaction of information could do that automated response, that's what clicked for me. And I said, it doesn't have to be obviously a cryptocurrency or any specific token value. It could just be information that you're exchanging. People are verifying through that consensus.

That's what really stuck. And I said, we exchange so much information every single day. Why not everything in construction? Why not the BIM model itself? Every decision that's made.

And that just really opened up a door for me when I heard about it. So what you're saying is, contractor submits an RFI for a change. Let's say a door is in the wrong spot, for example, or it's the wrong door. And then the person who knows most about that door, or the architect, or what have you, then replies back to the change of yes, that door is wrong, or it's this door now, or no, it's correct. And then that information then goes through multiple people for checking.

And once a consensus is done, then it automatically goes to a change order. So the question I have, are there weights of consensus? In other words, do more people get more weight like the owner gets more weight than the door contractor? Well, so as it stands, to my knowledge, there's no blockchain that actually articulates that specifically right now as it relates to construction. So let's just lay that out on the table.

We're still in like piloting, right? We're piloting a lot of ideas. And I think there's an opportunity to think that way. The other ideal here is, okay, so Bitcoin is a public blockchain that requires 51%. When you build a blockchain, you don't have to have 51% consensus.

And it doesn't also have to be public. It can be private. Obviously, with the private ones, that would make more sense for, I think, the built industry because you can have an owner operator decide how they want that blockchain to be run in the first place. And they can ensure that only the people on the project are on that particular network. And they can decide how the network interacts, how each person interacts with each other.

So, yeah, I mean, if you wanted to build in that weighting system, you would build it in by the people, like the quantity of people that are owner representing. Malachi, that's my thought process. What do you have in mind in regards to that? After nearly two years of reading articles, listening to TED Talks, listen to YouTube presentations, reading books, I would define blockchain as being simply complex. A blockchain basically has three elements to it.

The first is a technology which allows you to record the value transaction. That technology is distributed to people who are involved in the project, if you like. The second is a consensus mechanism. And there's a whole variety of different consensus mechanisms out there. But basically, it is to arrive at a 51% consensus where a decision needs to be made.

And the third really interesting element to this is a reward system. The reward system that we are most familiar with at the moment here is via a coin. And a coin is just an asset, if you like, and that can come in all sorts of different shapes and sizes. But after all this time of delving into blockchain, to me, the definition of the blockchain and why it's so exciting is that it has the possibility of incentivizing human behavior. And that becomes very, very interesting, particularly in the community of BIM.

BIM is really interesting in the terms of the communities that build up around it. And here are three of us on various parts of the world talking about BIM and having an interest and a knowledge of. It's fantastic when you go to conferences in different parts of the world and the conversations that you can have with people because you're all within this community. Blockchain has this possibility to build a design and construction community where they know that there's the possibility of trust. There's the possibility of being involved right from the shop floor up to the director board level in decision making, in consensus, arriving at consensus, but also to achieve a reward for that.

The reward could be in the form of a reputation currency. It could be in the form that I have worked with you, I've enjoyed working with you, and I'm going to award you a certain amount of X coin or whatever. And you will do the same for me. And the obvious question is, well, let's just do this and whatever. But the network effect is that this all levels out of somewhere along the way.

And the more people who get involved in this, it's that idea of being able to incentivise people to work together, to collaborate together. And if we provide the technologies and the client, an enlightened client, then when those things merge and mesh together, we're on the cusp, I think, of what is called for consistently within our business of culture change. So to me, one of the rewards would be the change order. Or the lack thereof. That would be a reward.

That's it. Or the lack thereof. That's right. Because everyone will have collaborated and come to some level of consensus. There's no reason for dispute anymore, unless it's truly an unknown condition.

But why would you have that anymore with the technology that we have with, you know, scanning and AI? You know, there's so many opportunities there. You know, Brittany, we're travelling down the road of this idea of the digital twin. The digital twin starts at the design side, where the model starts to build in terms of an aesthetic and spatial response to the client's brief and builds up from there into a technical model with input from all the various different factions of engineering, mechanical, electrical and civil and so on, building in then to a pricing structure, building into information that the client requires in terms of running the building over a life cycle of 25 years.

We're still somewhat early days in terms of them, but we're heading down towards that road of a digital twin. If we are on this collaborative works in the way that we would like it to work, then there shouldn't be a single change order in a construction site unless the client comes back and says, no, I want red doors instead of black doors or something like that. And then, you know, change order is issued. And I get a little bit worried when people talk too much about smart contracts, but I just see them as a utility in terms of blockchain.

They're not the be-all and end-all. They are a utility within the blockchain that if they're structured correctly and written correctly, that they can, again, efficiently organise the transfer of value from A to B, recognising that there's a consensus on value transaction that has happened. So you could have a whole series of smart contracts. It's one of the problems that contractors, and particularly with the supply chain, the further down the line you get, you know, sometimes it's the harder it is to get your money. That's where I think smart contracts can have, certainly have a role in terms of getting you your money quicker.

And then you looking back to the main contractor and going and saying, thank you very much. That's fantastic. I'm delighted I got my money so quickly. I'm going to work with you again. I'm going to work better for you next time around.

So there is definitely something happening in terms of that synergy that exists between BIM and blockchain. It's really, really exciting. And then again, from the owner's perspective, you mentioned the life cycle of the asset, the built asset, the building. It's though having that digital twin available for them to understand their maintenance and the operations of their building. And it allows for them to have a smarter understanding of the value of their asset.

I think that's something that if we can understand how the decisions were made and have all that data being tracked at that level of detail, I think having that follow along with the building, that does provide something so much more for the owner operator. Yeah, I think, again, the owner operator of buildings, there's something happening in that whole area there where rather than having a static building and in traditional sense, we've designed, we've constructed the building and the architect and the contractor walk away from it sometimes as quickly as possible.

But if the owner was able to use that building, and here's a small example of what can happen here. If you had a large office building or something like that, which has a glass facade or some style of facade on it, but if that facade could actually generate electricity for you to the point that you're generating more electricity than you're actually using in the building, what do you do with that extra electricity? Well, currently at the moment, it's not possible to sell that back into the national grid.

But there is a company in Germany who have little pole stations outside of the building in which you can charge anything from your mobile phone to your electric car from the electricity that has been generated by that building, all operated on a blockchain. So when you come in, you park your car, you swipe your phone, the pole generates a QR code, you swipe that and you're entering into a little contract, which is a smart contract, which means that for as long as you're charging your electric car, there's a micro payment has been deducted from your account, which goes to either the building owner or even the building occupants or even that could be a reward to the contractor or the designer in terms of the building.

So really interesting things can start to happen in terms of micro economies and based around micro energy grids. And it's opening up new thinking as to what and how we can operate our buildings. And again, if the client decided that here, I'm going to let you run that micro electricity grid for 25 years, if you design me a building, which is going to cost me nothing to run, you can have the excess electricity. So there's another magnificent encouragement towards a collaborative approach to design and construction.

We have a couple of micro grid projects here in the US, one in Brooklyn and actually here in Chicago, ComEd is testing some pilots, institutions to sell back energy to the grid. But I like the incentivization approach. I'm not sure they thought that far. So that's a really interesting concept. It is.

If the designer or whoever gets the money, then obviously they would pay for the grid installation and the product itself. Yeah. And how it's structured, there's various different ways you can structure it. But look behind this again, and what is behind it is probably what Brittany mentioned there. It's this idea of incentivizing the collaboration.

That's exciting in terms of a new way of going about our business. Yeah. Yes. And once transparent solar cells become mainstream, then it really makes some sense to do that kind of thing. Yeah, without a doubt.

I can see actually the manufacturers of the windows being the ones that provide the windows and get the reward for the energy going back to the grid or the sale of energy back. That makes more sense. Yeah, absolutely, Bill. Again, I was at a conference about 18 months ago and there was a facade engineer from one of the world leading engineering companies. And he was telling us that they are specifically designing their facade systems to be demountable or deconstructed after a 10 to 15 year period, not for wear and tear, because they know the technology is moving along so fast that it might be a value exercise for them to take down the existing facade, put up a new facade, which is going to generate more electricity for them or produce a better environment and whatever.

So that's happening. So let me ask this question. What's stopping us? Like what gets us from where we are today to utilizing blockchain with BIM? To me, Brittany, it's about people.

And we have such an ingrained and deep legacy in terms of how we've gone about things in the past. If we're talking in terms of trying to redesign that, I just don't think that's possible, to be honest with you. And this is all bound up in the management process and hierarchy, hierarchical management structures, which we have at the moment, the advancing nature and advantage of a network structure. And I think we might have to build up a somewhat mirroring Bitcoin as well, which has built up an alternative to the financial system and has gone through a seeding process, but is now a multi-billion financial economy.

When you go back to the origins of Bitcoin, it was built by anarchists and non-conformists and whatever. So maybe that's what we need in the design and construction industry is some anarchy, non-conformist design and construction people with a client that likes that idea and is willing to fund that idea. So to build up a new, not to change what is there, because if you change what is there, there's the possibility of it tumbling or falling over and companies falling over. And again, that type of disruption really affects management level, be it at the top level or middle management.

And everybody's there to protect their own. So you might make more headway and understood that idea of network collaboration and people working together because they want to work together. And you see instances of this all the time. And I know when I was contracting myself, I personally had some great relationships with engineers and contractors and site foremen and gangers and people like that. As long as it was on a personal level, it was fine.

But once you had a difficulty in terms of having to bring in management for a decision, then everything changed because the decision that the management made would be based on sometimes their own personal necessity in order to instigate their authority and things like that. So it's there. But I think it's an undercurrent. And what BIM, what blockchain and these new technologies which are designed for us to collaborate can allow us to do is possibly to reinvent construction industry. I can't say that.

You're allowed to say that we can disrupt the industry. See, I'm an academic and I'm allowed to say these things, you know. So maybe the next new architecture building at a university could start doing this and get going with all their theories and all that other stuff that they want to do to try to make the building level three, level what have you, and blockchain everything else. Yeah, I think we, Brittany, you probably agree what we need is a lead project is something that would do would take on that idea of doing it differently based again on the scaffold of trust that blockchain can provide.

And there's a whole series of structures around public procurement and a whole series of contracts that are involved in that and methodologies and processes and whatever. And a lot of them are very arcane and difficult and based on the delivery, traditional information have not been updated in terms of the digital transformation that has happened within that industry. Things like being able to deliver a BIM model for your planning application. Now, I know it's done in one or two countries around the world. It makes perfect sense because all the advantages of being able to visualize the building, proposed building in its context should be fantastic for planners to be able to do rather than working off 2D representational drawings, which is our current system here.

There are companies that are going against the grain. I think I've heard of in addition to the 2D drawings being submitted for permit that the model has been submitted and any requests that came back, they came back on a Bluebeam platform. I'm pretty sure CIDR Health, they pushed for that so that more collaboration could take place amongst all the parties who needed to be involved. You're right. Absolutely.

It takes people thinking outside of the box and pushing for the type of communication that's required in order to get the things done that everyone's going to be tasked with. But I think it is driven by radical owners. Maybe the Bitcoin building would be done with blockchain. I don't think anybody owns Bitcoin. I think that's what makes it great.

But we could build a building in its honor using Bitcoin as payment. Yeah, maybe. I like this idea. And reach consensus on its design. And we'll put a bunch of miners in the basement to help fund it.

But we would have to make sure that it is a net positive because we don't want to use that much energy. We're going to be using the transparent solar panels on all the windows and out on the street, out on the sidewalks as well. The part where as you push down on it, it generates electricity. The piezo. Yeah, I love this idea.

Perfection. Yeah. Yeah, it's all coming together. We'll put it on the bay as well so that we can generate wind energy and wave energy to help fund it. We're going to be so net zero.

We're going to be so negative in net zero that all the other buildings buying won't equal what we just give away. I like it. Yeah. If we're going to plan something, let's go big or go home. Wait, I am home.

Oh, no. There goes that building. So is there anything else we want to chat about? Just in terms of the pure administration of things like planning applications and whatever, again, some of the work that my students have done in developing scripts, which allow you to validate for statutory compliance in terms of, you know, basic things like bedroom sizes and the ratio of open windows to floor area space. These are all things that planners have to take into account when they make their decision on a building.

But majority of that is done still done manually in terms of measuring, checking what the room is. Whereas all this can be done via a script, a Dynamo script or something similar applied to blockchains. Currently in Ireland, from the date of lodgement, you wait eight weeks to get a decision plus another four weeks for objections from that. That's one of the things that holds up the necessity that we have here, both in Ireland and the UK, for a serious amount of residential housing building. But if you could do that in two days, think of the improvement in the process that you can bring along with digital technologies.

And I think that's where governments and where decision makers now need to be informed in terms of what can be done and how their business can be improved. So there's a whole world and a whole wealth, as I say, when I finish off my recent presentations to students, I only wish I was 20, 25 years younger because I think there's an enormously exciting future ahead in design construction. It is an exciting time for sure. I don't think there's ever been as an exciting time as there is in this industry.

Interesting. There's plenty of people who tell me that who could be on their way to retirement, but they're just too excited. So they want to stay. Really? Wow.

Who would have thought that could happen. Well, they're making good money too. So I think those particular people. No, I'm not going to retire. I'm going to stay.

Yeah. Yeah. I guess that makes sense. That's the reward for staying. Man, this has been fun.

Thank you so much, Maliki, for sharing your thoughts on BIM and blockchain and really instituting a more collaborative approach, thinking about what that looks like. Well, thank you very much, Brittany. It was great to talk to you and Bill, a real pleasure to make your acquaintance. And I've now started to follow you on Twitter. I'll be delving into your podcast now as well to see what gems I can pull out from that.

I think I only need 19 more people. How many I need? I mean, look. 18 now after today. I got my numbers mixed up.

I need 78 more people to reach a thousand followers. Okay. Just follow me and then ignore me. Then my number will go up. That'll make me feel better.

But yeah, this is exciting stuff. Thanks for having me on. Yeah, always a pleasure, Bill. If you liked this episode, find out more in the show notes at constructor.com slash Maliki Matthews. And that's Matthews with one T.

If you learned something valuable in this episode, share it with your friends and colleagues. You can also let me know you enjoyed our discussion today. You can also join our discussion by connecting with me on Twitter at Brittany and a score CT or find me on LinkedIn. You can also email me at the RITC and IE at constructor.com. That's Brittany at constructor.com.

Next week, you'll be hearing a replay of my episode with Peter Anchor Sturney, former CMO at ISS. He is if must second vice chair of if must board of directors. And last but not least, he is the founder of Service Marketing International, IVS based Denmark. Peter and I spoke when he was still at ISS and covered the value of service management. I look forward to sharing this episode with you next week.

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