I have written before about how Thursdays have become my construction site visit day. And that is still very much the case. It's something I look forward to — seeing our progress, testing my discomfort with heights, and learning what not to do in the future.

One of my rules for site visits is that you can never take too many photos. Because invariably, at some point in the future, something will come up and you'll wish you had a progress photo to look back to.

I find that having text somewhere in the image is the easiest way to search for stuff later. So if it doesn't already exist, I think someone should make a flip card-like contraption with common construction words on it that you can use when taking site photos. You know, with fun words like schluter.

Taking this logic even further, the best practice is a full 3D scan at each inspection stage. A digital twin is naturally going to be better than photos for finding where a particular pipe is going or what the waterproofing detail looks like in the location where you're now experiencing a leak.

We've been using Matterport, but I'm writing today to see if any of you have any other construction software that you would highly recommend. It could be for this exact purpose or for any other construction-related purpose. If you do, please leave a comment below.

Many of you have probably heard of the concept of a "digital twin." Put simply, it is a digital representation of a physical thing. This could be a thing that already exists or, in the case of a new building, it could be a thing that you're about to make exist.

But there's no reason to stop at the scale of a building. Right now, there are groups working on modeling entire cities. Sadly, in Ukraine, it is being done to document important buildings that could get destroyed. But in other places, it is being done in order to create a new kind of urban testing environment (via FT):

“In the city, you don’t have a development environment; you only have one city. The laboratory is the place where the planners go to test. So test in a digital twin and then develop or implant in the city. That’s going to be the value.”

The thinking is that if you combine a digital twin with good real-time urban data and AI, then you might actually be able to start testing new city building initiatives. For instance, maybe you could ask it: What would happen if we added a traffic lane, here? Would it actually help congestion or would it induce new demand?

It's hard to model this kind of stuff today, which is one of the reasons why there's usually fierce debate about seemingly everything. But if we had accurate models that could tell us something close to reality, that feels like it would be a game changer for city builders.