Innovation, sustainability and efficiency are key to the building sector, writes Haydn Shaughnessy

THE QUESTION of whether good times or bad are best for innovation is likely to be answered over the coming years in Ireland, particularly in the building trade.

Over the past decade, labour shortages in the building trade led, for example, to the adoption of off-site modules in construction at a faster rate than they might without that pressure point.

With the changing economic climate, however, it's less clear where the future pressure points for innovation in this sector will be, and what we might expect.

According to Keith Finglas, managing director of consultancy firm Innovation Delivery, a Gartner analyst report two years ago showed IT spend in construction stands at just 0.5 per cent. "In the banking centre it is around 3.5 per cent and the norm across industry is 2.5 per cent. The building industry is clearly lagging," says Finglas.

The application of IT to construction seems an obvious area in which to explore greater efficiencies. Another key area in vogue at present in the construction sector is environmental sustainability.

"We've seen a radical change in the propensity of investors to commit to sustainable energy and design," says Sustainable Energy Ireland's head of the built environment, Kevin O'Rourke.

If IT and environmental concerns clamour for our attention, the past years of economic boom has presented challenges that the authorities responsible for planning have arguably failed to meet.

Because of excesses over the past decade, in part led by developer enthusiasm, future innovation, according to some interested parties, will have to be directed at the public policy sphere. Not least is the issue of where building design stands as a profession.

"I think there are going to be impacts," says Sean Ó Laoire, current President of the Royal Institute of Irish Architects. "They're already evident with quite significant lay-offs, but then you might say, well, this is a cyclical business and lay-offs happen from time to time."

Ó Laoire claims the pressure points in building design are policy-related and urgent.

"For the first time there's international recognition of Irish architecture and design, a good creative culture with young architects excited about working in an Irish practice, new architects' schools in Cork and Waterford, and more. The question we need to ask is, are we simply prepared to dissipate a decade of creative endeavour?"

The RIAI's concern is that a critical mass exists for Irish design talent to blossom, but suddenly the work available for this burgeoning profession is drying up. If that sounds like a special pleading, it is against the background of design becoming more and more pervasive.

"Do you look for other ways to use these skills?" Ó Laoire asks. "For example, should we engage architects in local planning administration, which is bedevilled by lack of resources and poor governance?"

O'Rourke of Sustainable Energy Ireland agrees that innovation is needed in public planning and urban design.

"There needs to be a drive toward making it attractive for consumers and developers to take a more holistic approach, so that transport and sustainable energy supply are taken into account in the planning process," he says.

There's very little net gain from more energy-efficient houses if their occupants leave a carbon footprint on an hour and a half commute into a city.

"The only green shoots I see," says a despairing Ó Laoire, "is in urban design, and progressive local authorities and developers looking at master planning as a framework for dialogue and involving architects."

The pressure to innovate in this over-arching area of planning might be pressing, but as yet it is unclear what mechanisms might be put in place to direct change. The service design innovation is absent, according to Ó Laoire.

On the other hand, examples are beginning to arise of how new communications technologies can help create efficiencies in how we plan and build.

"The construction industry has largely used IT in the office rather than giving it to field staff," says Finglas, whose company specialises in designing innovation programmes and is active in the construction sector. "In the US there are already examples of firms using the web to create spot-markets in concrete, so if you have a load that is in danger of going off while you wait at a site you can trade it," he says by way of example.

He refers also to the use of Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) to tag and track supplies on building sites as a key cost innovation. RFID trials in Britain by BT Auto-ID, a division of the BT telecommunications firm, were positively received. However, more exotic applications of IT will have as important an impact.

In conjunction with computer service firm IBM, Swiss building giant Implenia has recently developed a virtual control room, prototyped in the online virtual world Second Life.

This virtual control room means Implenia can design buildings without the need for actual control rooms and can reduce overheads by controlling facilities such as heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) within a 3D virtual room. They estimate that the system has the potential to create a 25 per cent saving in building management costs.

Using virtual facilities in the design process is an area that is only beginning to find its feet. Studio Wikitecture (www.studiowikitecture.com) is an initiative designed to bring the benefits of Wikis, online collaborative knowledge environments, to building design.

Wikitecture combines a wiki with a virtual presence. Designers suggest modules and options for a building which they prototype. Meanwhile, participants (a building's potential users, developers, planners) can vote on the suitability or desirability of those options. The idea is that buildings become better suited to use through extensive but real time consultation at the design stage.

Meanwhile, US networking giant CISCO has collaborated with Palomar Pomerado Health in Florida to create a virtual hospital. The real life hospital launches in 2011. The virtual equivalent launched last February.

Its purpose is to allow the design team to gather feedback on the layout and facilities but also, later, to familiarise patients with the processes and environment, a potential area for service innovations and cost saving.

On the more prosaic level of what houses might be like to live in, SEI's Kevin O'Rourke sees a number of areas where innovations will be necessary. Now that we live in increasingly well insulated houses, the indoor atmosphere needs to be better ventilated. But there's no point wasting energy saved by insulation on dragging air into the house.

"The real issue is going to be the quality of the indoor environment, in terms of air quality, in highly insulated environments," O'Rourke says. He suggests heating systems so small they would currently be too small to regulate, mechanical ventilation systems, solar heat, and services like air-leakage testing are going to be the hot innovation areas.

SEI is about to launch a new series of initiatives that direct innovation at non-heat power usage in home and offices and with ever rising fuel prices, SEI's success in stimulating change looks reasonably assured.

Half of a house's CO2 emissions now come from non-heat sources. "We need to make inroads into electricity usage," O'Rourke says, calling the issue "a serious challenge for the coming five years".

As he also points out, these innovations can count for little if they don't have the right planning context. It might well turn out that a pivotal innovation for Ireland lies within public policy and the ability of politicians and administrators to harness the positives that have come out of the past decade, while managing the negatives of economic decline.

"We need an alliance between Government and industry," says Ó Laoire, referring to the apparently inevitable loss of design jobs. "We need to see what can be done to protect these skills, but as yet we haven't asked how these new skill sets can be used."

The consequences of losing our new design talent could prove costly unless mechanisms are found to redeploy architects into different areas of the economy.

That might be a testing proposition, but as design becomes more integral to every facet of commerce, manufacture and service, there is the distinct possibility that the building industry's loss could be the country's gain.