Dive Brief:

• An event billed as the first AEC Hackathon put construction professionals together with technology experts on the corporate campus of Facebook for a weekend of problem-solving.
• The people from each side were broken up into teams and given construction-related technology problems to attempt to solve by combining their knowledge and unconventional approaches.
• The "hackathon" was an effort to use ideas and techniques in use in the gaming or other technology industries as springboards for solving construction-industry problems by taking new approaches, then seeing if the team could make it all work.

Dive Insight:

Solutions that the teams created and that can be carried into practical applications will be built on open-source programming and available to anyone who wants to use them and build on them. The best compliment to the "hackathon" approach may have come from Klas Berghede, who is production leader at Boldt Co., in Appleton, Wis., and who observed, "It’s been a great experience to have developers who will listen to our problems, instead of trying to tell us what our problems are."