In early 2013, buildingSMART alliance® formed the NBIMS-US 2021 Vision Task Force (VTF) to focus on defining, predicting, forecasting, and in some cases guessing at what the future of the building industry might hold, and therefore what NBIMS-US™ needs to look like to support that future. This is a highly strategic effort that will form the basis of a larger effort aimed at developing a comprehensive roadmap for the entire capital facility industry. The importance of these efforts cannot be understated in any context.

The initial effort of the VTF was to request subject matter experts from every corner of our industry to provide short essays about the nature of their role, profession, or industry as it will be in 8-10 years.

We collected close to 40 of these essays (a sampling of which are below), and also spent considerable time researching other references to the future of our industry (conferences, seminars, writings, etc). We then wove all this knowledge together to create a compelling, and tangible vision of how a construction project may be built in the future, including the technologies and processes that would be in common use.

We have produced this vision in two very different and entertaining styles. Choose your preferred style, download and read it now to understand what the future of construction might, just might, look like. Both stories center on construction of a six-story children's medical care facility that opened on May 22, 2021.

Building Industry Vision 2021 - A View into the Future: A case study of the building industry in 2021  

Building Industry Vision 2021 - A View into the Future: A short novel about the Springfield Children's Care Facility  

Developed by the NBIMS-US 2021 Vision Task Force.

Essays

Below are some of the essays submitted for the NBIMS-US 2021 Vision Task Force effort. These essays are mostly unedited and unformatted originals of essays submitted by various subject matter experts that went to form the overall vision represented in the publications above. All are available as Adobe Acrobat PDFs.  

Sponsors

Special thanks to the sponsors below for their contributions to the 2021 Vision Task Force.

Vision Task Force Members

The task force was in place for a period of one year starting January 2013, and reporting to the Building Innovation conference a year later in January 2014.