Emerging Human- Data Interactions within Construction and the Built Environment : A White Paper by the Human-Data Interaction (HDI) Committee of the European Council on Computing in Construction (EC3)

Edited book, 2025

The world has moved from a position where technology-mediated interactions were siloed and specialised, to a world where they have become ubiquitous and part of our everyday lives. The construction sector and the built environment are no exceptions. Advances in sensing, computing and communication technologies are changing the interactions between humans and the built environment in which they live and operate. The growing digitalisation of processes within the built environment are transforming it into an interconnected and interactive system in which data, collected with a varying level of automation from the physical environment (e.g., buildings, bridges, highways, water networks, offsite factories) and exchanged with other ‘things’ and ‘humans’ in various ways, play a central role. Existing interactions are being altered and new interactions are being introduced. Understanding such interactions is of paramount importance to improving the social, economic and environmental performance of the built environment for all involved
parties.

Existing approaches and techniques, available to academia and industry, mostly originated from the field of ‘Human-Computer Interaction’ (HCI) in a world of desktop computers as artefacts and are being extended to ‘human-to-thing’ interactions. However, the context of ‘interactions’ within construction and the built environment is fundamentally different to that of HCI due to the variety of ‘data’ sources, the multitude of data transformation opportunities, and the versatility of the role of ‘humans’. Although Human-Data Interactions (HDI) within the construction and built environment literature are, at times, ‘implicitly’ studied, their explicit contextualisation is not sufficient, thus limiting our understanding of this field.

To respond to this challenge, this white paper by EC3’s HDI Technical Committee aims to:
• Introduce the first working definition of HDI that is suitable for the Architecture, Construction, Engineering and Operation (AECO) sector.
• Review and analyse emerging developments of key digital innovations relevant to the AECO sector from a human-centred lens. Six areas were analysed in this paper: i) smart buildings and cities, ii) virtual and augmented reality, iii) machine learning and deep learning for construction, iv) sensored construction sites, v) robotics for industrialised construction, vi) blockchain and distributed ledger technologies.
• Outline ethical, regulatory and human factors relevant to the AECO sectors when adopting digital innovations.

This white paper provides evidence supporting the establishment of 'Human-Data Interaction' as a central research domain within the AECO sector – one that reconciles the various annotations (e.g., Human-Building Interaction, Human-Robot Interaction, Human-Computer Interaction, Human-Machine Interaction, among others) and enables the re-focusing of attention on human-centred aspects, data and interactions. 

Each of the aforementioned six areas provided a snapshot of emerging applications of digital innovation, identified human-centred issues and proposed some directions for future research and consideration.

This white paper is intended as an initial manifest by the EC3 HDI Technical Committee both to raise the awareness about HDI aspects in the AECO sector among researchers, practitioners and policymakers, and to invite collaborations and investment in this field.