Humanism in a technology centric world: Enabling a digital twin for Industry 5.0

Keri Niven, Digital Practice Leader, Aurecon.

Keri Niven - Biography

Keri is a passionate Digital Technologist, with a strong background in Geospatial technologies, and over 20 years international experience in designing enterprise collaboration platforms.

Keri is the New Zealand Digital Practice Leader and is focussed on identifying digital possibilities and creating opportunities to embed new technologies into our organisational way of working.

Keri’s primary area of expertise is in integrating principles of human centred design with visualisation and interactive technologies to facilitate better engagement and insight. With experience gained from infrastructure and construction projects around the world Keri is passionate about design technologies and international best practice frameworks that enable full lifecycle asset and information management. Keri is particularly interested in automating the interfaces between multidisciplinary modelling and design environments and using this to improve efficiency and co-ordination. Keri represents Aurecon on the ANZ Smart Cities Council and on the ANZ Digital Twin Taskforce.

Abstract

As engineers and designers, we have a responsibility to create sustainable and responsible human-centric physical and digital legacy. Our decisions, particularly regarding how we use technology to solve problems, will profoundly shape our future.

This obligation has been recognised by the shift towards industry 5.0. This latest revolution represents the return of human-centric activities that are enabled by technology – and a refocus of technology towards supporting the collaboration and creativity that we as humans crave.

This is wonderful news for an organisation like Aurecon who for the last 6 years has been teaching 6000 people to think like designers. Working and thinking like designers is how we approach all our work. It’s a considered way of combining our creativity and expertise to move from existing situations to preferred ones by putting people at the centre of the solution.

A design mindset enables us to ask questions such as;

How could we better leverage technologies to keep our people safe?

If we removed all our technology, would our processes and data still be sound?

How can we replace 2D processes with a digital twin for every design project that lives and grows across successive project phases and that can be connected to other twins to create cumulative value?

How can we create data ecosystems that drive collaboration and enable informed decision making?

How can we harness visual technologies to engage more meaningfully with our stakeholders?

We do some really cool stuff at Aurecon, both exploring and delivering projects that address these questions.

This talk will share how we harness human innovation as a mindset, and how connecting our unique perspective to the right digital tools can solve our worlds most wicked problems.

Synopsis

What is industry 5.0 and how will it impact our ways of working, relationships with technology and the roles we hold? How can a design mindset create new opportunities for leveraging digital tools and innovation to uncover new opportunities for collaboration and decision making?

This talk will explore how the roles of engineers and designers are changing, and how we can best harness human innovation to shoulder the responsibility for leaving a digital and physical legacy that is sustainable in the face of an ever-uncertain future.

Please join us for networking and light refreshments at 12:30 pm; the talk will begin at 1:00 pm.

All are welcome!