The latest episode of the Chartered Institute of Building’s (CIOB) new podcast, 21CC, launches today with an investigation into what futurologists of the 1970s got right about the built environment of the 2000s.
“Look at its portrayal of both the inside and outside of the home of the future, you’ve got solar panels on the roof, you’ve got an [electric vehicle] outside, you’ve got wind turbines, insulation, all sorts of technologies that are incredibly familiar on the outside,” notes applied futurologist Tom Cheesewright, who has written the foreword to the re-release of the popular 1979 Usborne Book of the Future.
“And actually the picture on the inside doesn’t look that different to reality either – there’s a big screen TV, there’s a computer in the background, there’s someone watching sports on the sofa. There are some things it does have wrong. Its idea of email was rather too close to fax. It was still bound to physical media, to the CD, and its version of the internet looks rather like Ceefax, but given its range was 2000 to 2020, that’s pretty good.”
PPE that fits
Also in the episode, new CIOB president Sandi Rhys-Jones kicks off her presidential year with an awkward question: Why can’t we give everyone PPE that fits?
She tells Construction Management deputy editor Cristina Lago how the industry could turn that blind spot into a surprising advantage.
And, in a segment sponsored by Cohesive, David Philp, chair of the CIOB’s innovation advisory group, discusses the latest thinking on construction and “ESG”, the acronym for environment, social wellbeing, and governance.
“We never looked at the behaviours and we kind of forget that, despite these technologies and policies, we’ve never really made the lifestyle choices in our sector,” he tells Justin Stanton, editor of BIMplus.
The episode is available here and on all major podcast platforms.
