Last edited 15 Dec 2021

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BSRIA Institute / association Website

CIC BIM 2050 Group

CIC logo.png BIM2050 logo.png

BSRIA's Dr Sarah Birchall who is also a member of the CIC BIM 2050 Group explains what the group is about and how it aims to help improve the future of the built environment.


The Construction Industry Council (CIC) is a forum for professional bodies, research organisations and specialist business associations in the construction industry, established in 1988 to provide '…a single voice for professionals in all sectors of the built environment'.

The CIC BIM 2050 group strives to develop a culture which enables an open, digitally-integrated approach to positively impact our future built environment.

The first BIM2050 Group was set up by the CIC in September 2012 and was chaired by David Philp, at the time Head of the then BIM Implementation Group at the Cabinet Office.

The group was refreshed in 2015 and is now chaired by the former vice chair Neil Thompson, UK Head of Digital Research & Innovation at Balfour Beatty plc. It consists of a collection of young industry professionals, from architects, engineers and contractors, to legal professionals and surveyors, each representing their respective professional institutions.

BIM 2050 Group meeting.jpg

The group's vision is to lead the built environment into the future and to inspire open innovation, change and collaboration in the built environment. The scope of the group is to not only focus on the built environment, but also to reach out to other sectors and industries to explore and integrate parallels.

The year 2050 signifies that the group does not limit its thinking to what is technically feasible today, but allows for imagining a radically different industry in which change is long term and sustained.

The group's drivers are to:

The first meeting of the new group in April 2015 started with a brain-storm of the group's vision and what it wanted to achieve. The group decided it wanted to iterate and build upon the structure of the previous group and proposed a number of workstreams:

Culture and technology are the two key enablers with which BIM permeates the built environment sector. The figure below shows how the workstreams are structured and how they support one another.

Structure of the BIM 2050 Group workstreams.png

The BIM 2050 group is committed to understanding and expounding the developing trends within technology and culture that will impact on the built environment sector by 2050. Ensuring that the built environment sector can see the possibilities on the horizon and navigate itself into a world that is sustainable, profitable, open and a source of social and environmental quality.


This article originally appeared in BSRIA's Delta T magazine, published in November 2015.

--BSRIA

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