Amin Hassanpour Divshali, director in the creative technologies team at Bryden Wood, reveals his Digital Life this week, calling for a deep understanding of digital technology and highlighting the difficulty in distinguishing fact from fiction on social media.
What new built environment digital innovation that you’ve seen recently really excites you?
Any technology that is related to digital robotic fabrication or digital robotic assembly has always been fascinating for me. This can bridge the gap between digital thinking/design and conventional approaches towards construction.
What single thing would help accelerate construction’s digital adoption?
Deep understanding of digital technology. For several centuries, we created the best buildings and infrastructure by having a deep understanding of technology. But currently, as an industry, we’re waiting for experts from other sectors to create our new tools/software/solutions. Or we’re expecting existing tools to work that haven’t been developed for our needs. We must approach digital technologies differently and lead in developing and shaping them in order to benefit from them fully. We can’t stand back and expect the tech industry to create our technology, which is why architects in our creative tech team at Bryden Wood are focussed on doing just that.
Who do you follow on social media about BIM and digital construction and why?
I don’t follow people or organisations on social media, instead I follow topics/hashtags like technology, computing and design related topics like AI, Opensource, digital fabrication and parametric design. The intersection of these topics with architecture and the [wider construction] industry has always been interesting for me. But I do (of course!) recommend following @BrydenWood.
What was the last app you downloaded and why?
Minikube and VirtualBox to run Kubernetes clusters locally and asses the scalability of stateful applications.
What’s the tech bane of your life?
How digital social media combined with our private data is going to shape our physical behaviours and sometimes spread misinformation. This often makes it hard to distinguish facts from fiction.
Mac or PC/iOS or Android?
I am pretty much a Linux/web person. In our office, we usually set up development environments in Linux. There have been great steps recently by open source developers towards a Linux/web-centric future, which is also relevant to the architecture and construction industry.
Do you have any smart home features or other digital gadgets?
I don’t have a lot of gadgets, but I am very interested in tinkering with single board computers, exploring their computing possibilities and combining them in different creative ways.
