Chloe Donovan, Managing Director of Natural Building Systems and Material Research Limited, discusses the traditional sluggishness of planning and the construction industry in embracing innovation. However, she highlights a promising shift towards ‘kit-of-parts’ Modern Methods of Construction (MMC) solutions. These solutions blend the strengths of traditional volumetric methods with a modern, digital and fabrication-led approach, better suited for design flexibility, disassembly and circularity.
In an industry traditionally slow to embrace technological and innovative changes, a new cohort of disruptors, myself included, is emerging. We’re determined to shift the paradigm towards a more environmentally conscious and technologically driven approach to building design and construction.
Despite strides in operational and energy efficiencies, the construction sector remains heavily reliant on extractive and polluting materials, exacerbating its environmental footprint and achieving less than one-quarter of the required reduction in our annual embodied carbon emissions. As a Trustee of the Food Ethics Council, my background in scrutinising social, environmental and ethical aspects of food and farming systems propelled me towards exploring the potential of UK-grown short-cycle biomass crops in creating sustainable homes and buildings. The dual value of addressing the housing crisis while leveraging buildings for natural carbon capture spurred the founding of Natural Building Systems back in 2019.
Over the past five years, our focus has been on researching and prototyping a digitally designed and manufactured bio-based ‘kit of parts.’ This system, designed for disassembly and reconfiguration, integrates digital tools to enhance design workflow efficiency and enable a distributed yet scalable manufacturing approach.
We have made significant progress and delivered a number of pilot projects, but challenges abound, particularly in integrating various digital platforms tailored to our systemised solution. Nonetheless, these hurdles provide fertile ground to push the boundaries of existing technological solutions without resorting to costly proprietary alternatives.
One area where the industry has already made significant strides is in digital modelling, which can analyse and optimise diverse performance metrics ranging from energy efficiency to cost, site sequencing and safety, scheduling and build quality. Some are useful but often don’t go far enough, others are misleading or inaccurate because they are based on inaccurate data or user input or don’t account for different modalities.
For instance, conventional thermal efficiency metrics fail to accurately predict operational energy use and thermal comfort, because building physics are inherently dynamic. Fluctuating parameters relating to regional weather and occupancy patterns interact with material properties such as specific heat capacity, vapour porosity and hygroscopicity of different layers in a building’s thermal envelope. The outputs from dynamic hygrothermal analysis can point to very different conclusions in the design and specification of materials when compared to statutory minimum targets.
It’s understandably hard to justify the cost of deploying more sophisticated dynamic digital modelling tools for one-off projects. Yet, on a systems level, their utility becomes evident.
Our work with bio-based insulation materials, particularly hemp composites, aims to benefit from their wider more subtle (but measurable) characteristics and performance benefits of bio-based materials such as reduced decrement factor and improved air quality, in comparison to plastic foam and mineral alternatives. We have a team of material researchers who combine physical material characterisation with dynamic thermal modelling to optimise material efficiency and facilitate a systematic approach to building performance with bio-based materials. Digital modelling tools have been indispensable in our endeavour to transition towards a new paradigm of material and energy constraints.
Our approach encompasses a variety of digital platforms which facilitate cost and carbon transparency and efficiency through the early design stages allowing for efficient appraisal of design and material specifications aka ‘optioneering’ in future this will be achieved by using material sustainability databases linked to real-time parametric geometry tools. Furthermore, our digital kit-of-parts seamlessly integrates with VR/AR technologies, aiding customers and developers in visualising and interacting with BIM Models and concept designs.
Conventional construction suffers from chronic low productivity. There is a shortage of skilled labour, leading to cost inflation and delays. In the UK alone, the construction sector’s workforce has decreased by 273,000 since 2019. The sector is also responsible for about 20-30% of all known serious occupational injuries. Our goal is to meet these challenges with digitally manufactured construction components where designers build detailed digital twins, machine-ready for CNC (computer numerical control) production: avoiding resource misallocation, duplication and delays.
By using digital fabrication alongside lean manufacturing principles our standardised components drive efficiency gains and maximise PMV (Pre-Manufactured Value), while data-driven quality control ensures a consistent product and reduced waste.
Embracing the human-centric vision of Industry 5.0, digitally enabled circularity, together with distributed manufacturing, reduces operating costs by cutting resource consumption. Digital platforms connect teams across competencies and locations, encouraging creative, collective thinking and transdisciplinary collaboration. This empowers continuous improvement efforts; fostering a culture of learning and innovation aligned with lean principles. Seamless connectivity with suppliers and customers facilitates resilience, through just-in-time inventory management and optimised logistics; reducing inventory carrying costs, minimising overproduction and ensuring smooth production flow.
The advantages of digital fabrication and off-site manufactured construction become apparent during the assembly stage, with BIM platforms providing multi-dimensional information for accurate progress on-site. Our kit-of-parts system facilitates assembly, disassembly and re-use, enabled by embedded digital product passports tracking every stage of a component’s lifecycle. This means buildings can be re-configured, extended or reduced without waste. Alterations and upgrades to mechanical and electrical services, for example, are made simple by easy substitution of individual components with identical pre-manufactured parts; incorporating service sleeves, ducts and conduits.
Ultimately, the synergy between the performance advantages of bio-based materials and the potential of Industry 5.0 offers a transformative opportunity for the construction industry. By embracing emergent digital technologies, we aim to demonstrate that the current linear, extractive model of high environmental burdens, use and waste can be replaced by catalysing a shift towards climate-positive buildings made from entirely regenerative materials, designed for a circular economy.
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