Enhancing inclusivity

Over at Changi Airport, travellers focused on their flights might not linger long enough in Terminal 2 to appreciate its finer points.

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struction process, she says. This pace of innovation is surprising even to Ms Lee, who graduated with a bachelor's degree in civil engineering from the National University of Singapore in 2012.

"I wasn't expecting to be doing BIM, but there was a need for a specialist when BCA was rolling out new requirements," she says. "I found it quite interesting, because it's like a gamified simulation of construction."

This led her to pursue a PhD in digital construction technology at the Osaka University in 2019. "Initially BIM had a very small use case, purely for visualisation. Moving forward, we saw use cases grow," she says.

Today, her role involves implementing suitable technologies across the company's projects, which include Singapore General Hospital's Elective Care Centre and National Dental Centre Singapore next to Outram Park MRT station, and the Johor Bahru-Singapore Rapid Transit System (RTS) Link's Woodlands North station.

The main benefit, Ms Lee says, is that user needs can be rigorously accounted for before construction begins: "People get a space that has gone through many iterations to make sure it fits their purpose."

Since moving into their Punggol home two decades ago, Mr Ang Kian Seng and his family of five have not turned on the air conditioning, except when the haze is "very bad".

"The fan is (more than) enough," says the father of three daughters in their 20s, who says his five-room HDB apartment on the 16th storey is well-ventilated when the front door and windows are open.

Mr Ang is intimately familiar with energy use as one of the pioneers of the BCA Green Mark certification scheme, which was launched 20 years ago.