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COVID-19 was officially declared as a worldwide pandemic by the World Health Organisation on 11th March 2020, before the UK was put into lockdown on the 23rd March 2020. Organisations had to reconsider their policies and procedures to allow their businesses to continue. This paper aims to focus on the effects of COVID-19 that the UK construction sector has had to undertake to enable businesses while employees had to adhere to COVID-19 lockdown rules. In addition, how the sector can positively continue once normality has returned within the industry. In doing so, this paper understands the historical issues within the construction sector and has had an effect during COVID-19.

A qualitative research methodology approach was taken to help obtain live information. In total, 19 semi-structured interviews from 15 organisations related to the construction sector were conducted to collect data. This information was evaluated using thematic analysis to arrive at the results, inferences and recommendations to the sector.

This research has revealed that companies have had to adopt a three-stage process to overcome a new dimensional challenge of COVID-19. These include: 1. Making quick decisions during the first stage of the pandemic. 2. Producing new policies and procedures to restart businesses enabling staff to return to the workplace safely. 3. Implementing methods to future-proof organisations against any potential pandemics. To help organisations future-proof their business five C’s are recommended.

This paper provides a rich insight into the understanding and awareness of the effects of COVID-19 and the changes that the construction sector has had to undertake to adhere to the lockdown rules while remaining productive. This research contributes towards informing policymakers on some of the lessons learned during the management of the COVID-19 pandemic from a construction sector perspective.

The purpose of this paper is to fill a gap in the real estate academic literature by defining the essence of real estate in smart urban environments. Space has traditionally been a silent component of real estate. Smart technologies powered by Ubi-comp are turning space into an active part of real estate, which represents a paradigm shift for commercial real estate. This shift requires new concepts and tools to analyse and model real estate in smart cities.

The paper defines the notions of smart space and smart real estate. Several concepts and tools are formulated, starting with a model of space users in smart cities, called the Cyber-Dasein inspired by Heidegger’s existential phenomenology of space.

The paper then analyses smart space’s attributes and proposes several metrics for commercial real estate in smart environments. After introducing three regression models for constructing a price index of smart real estate, the paper concludes by advocating that commercial real estate take an active role in the current debate about smart cities.

The paper does not provide any empirical analysis of smart real estate.

Smart environments offer real estate a unique opportunity to set up methodologies, concepts and tools for new properties in new cities. Now is the time to think carefully about the impact smart technologies will have on commercial properties before other stakeholders (in particular smart cities vendors and multinational technology giants) have fully modelled smart space and its nexus with smart real estate.

This paper is the first paper to provide a conceptual framework for the analysis of commercial real estate in smart cities.

This paper aims to describe three major difficulties with dealing with the future.

The paper is an essay with limited use of literature.

Looking to the future is difficult due to cognitive, social, business problems.

No empirical research was conducted.

Suggests that more practical training in futures research and testing ideas and plans against future trends is required.

The paper provides a broad view on difficulties of dealing with the future.

The purpose of this paper is to present outcomes from a post-occupancy evaluation (POE) of a sustainable university building development.

A POE was conducted for a sustainable university building in Melbourne, Australia. The method included interviews with key stakeholders involved in the design, construction and occupation of the building. The interviews were complemented by conducting a Builder User Satisfaction survey and analysis of two year’s worth of building performance data.

While technically the building saw a significant improvement in performance in comparison to existing buildings at the university, it ultimately did not meet its design performance goals as determined by the design rating. The interviews revealed limited formal documenting of lessons learnt and the challenges associated with using a sustainable and innovative building to drive cultural change. A major success was the realisation by the university of the benefits that the systematic POE provided. Lessons are now being applied to other new and refurbished buildings on campus, with POE now an integrated part of these processes.

While there are some studies of sustainable university operations and buildings, many focus on one or two parts of the process and fail to include evaluation of the full sustainability approach to check if stated goals have been met. This paper begins to address this gap. Learnings from the research are applicable to the wider building development industry and demonstrate the important role universities can play in shaping the sustainability of urban environments.

This chapter provides a critical discussion of challenge-based learning (CBL) within future trends in higher education (HE). It explores how CBL may address challenges facing higher education institutions (HEIs) in response to these future trends by using a framework of common CBL characteristics. Clear recommendations for CBL practitioners to succeed in CBL implementation within the ever-changing HE landscape are presented. It complements previous chapters on CBL case studies by situating CBL in the broader HE space. A discussion on the interrelationships between these characteristics and predictions on the future integration of CBL in HE concludes this chapter. These macrolevel discussions of CBL will be of interest to government officials, managers, business stakeholders, teachers, policy advisors, and academic teachers. Insights on the future institutional impact of CBL, how it may improve business and academic collaborations, how it aligns with sustainability and transversal skills policies, and where CBL is situated in the post-COVID-19 landscape are discussed. Ultimately, it argues that CBL is part of a pedagogical toolkit to meet future trends in HE.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the key drivers affecting property investment decisions within a context of sustainability and how these drivers are likely to change the investment product landscape and the management of existing property investment portfolios.

Examples from the Australian property market are discussed in order to demonstrate how sustainability principles may form part of the wider agenda of corporate property investment strategy and social responsibility.

A full understanding of the impact of sustainability on the property investment landscape can only be found by adopting an holistic approach, including the behavioural effects of economic, social, ecological, policy and regulative environments.

This paper provides important new insights as to the effect that sustainability may have on future investment decisions and the future investment product landscape.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the changes, including those around Employee Development Planning (EDP) made by training company Options 2, to modernise performance appraisals, optimise employee performance, and enable the company to expand its skills base in order to meet current and future contractual obligations.

Under the guidance of outsourced HR firm, HR Solutions, Options 2 was introduced to an “always available, anywhere” cloud-based EDP and employee performance management tool, Dinamiks.

Benefits around upskilling through training, employee performance improvement, and meeting contractual specifications have accrued. The tool also helped Options 2 be accepted by the National Career Service as a provider of training.

A need was identified to link, more effectively, input (into Dinamiks) by some employees to company objectives. This is viewed as a cultural hangover from the days of paper-based appraisals and is being addressed.

Options 2 makes more effective use of its employees, who are better trained; is better placed to meet current and future contractual obligations; has been accepted by the National Career Service as a provider of training.

Options 2 encourages staff to have interests outside the business and to detail these within Dinamiks in order to build up a picture of the wider social aspects of employees, to their betterment as individuals inside and outside the company.

The “always available, anywhere” aspects, and the comprehensive capabilities of EDP are original for, and of lasting business value to, Options 2.

The constant updating and unstoppable advance of technologies, mixing of platforms, programs and codes and the new trends in funding, among other factors, have led us to a present-future full of interactive, collaborative, participatory and co-creative digital artefacts and works. Games, experimental projects, short films and interactive video clips, in relation to fictional and non-fictional narrative, like documentary and journalism mainly, generate a complex body of works that depend on a series of compatibilities between technologies and languages to work properly and keep up with the times. The main purpose of this article is to analyse how the expression forms of interactive nonfiction narrative can be exhibited and preserved, looking at four main genres: documentary, journalism, museums and education.

At the methodological level, a study of analogue and digital forms in the proposed areas was performed, and a series of projects as case studies were analysed. In addition, a series of initiatives and institutions developing preservation methods are listed and ten effective strategies have been proposed to preserve interactive and transmedia nonfiction works.

The results make it possible to propose new ways of exhibiting and preserving valuable digital non-fiction works that need to be catalogued and safeguarded for the future.

For non-digital artistic forms of expression, copies were the main way of ensuring their preservation, but how does this process work for digital art forms? This area is a virgin field that urgently needs to be studied to determine and generate structures for preserving these types of works.