Design Green! 2024 brought the digital transformation process and the role of digital twins to the foreground of creating sustainable built environments. The event was held on the 29th April 2024 at the National Library of Singapore. The event sought to stimulate onward conversations around digital twins through the unveiling of a groundbreaking book – Hardware Software Heartware: Digital Twinning for more Sustainable Built Environments by Prof Jason Pomeroy. Opening remarks were followed by a keynote lecture from Prof Pomeroy, a fireside chat with leading experts in the digital transformation sphere and concluded with a cocktail reception and book signing.

Design Green 2024: Hardware Software Heartware: Keynote Lecture

While the study and implementation of DT’s has been critically explored as virtual, dynamic 3D replicas of physical entities across different disciplines and industries, this book establishes a strategy that recognises the need for the ‘software’ behind virtual DT platforms to not only represent the ‘hardware’ of our physical cities but also to reflect the ‘heartware’ of socio-economic and cultural practices. Knowledge gaps and challenges in existing DT’s are identified and insights into rethinking their purpose are provided to propose a new DT paradigm model for city-wide application. With multiple case studies illustrating the different concepts of DT’s being applied in cities from Europe, North America, The Middle East, Asia and Oceania, the keynote highlighted the reasons why and how DT’s can play an integral role in the sustainability of our urban habitats.

Design Green 2024: Hardware Software Heartware: Fireside Chat

A fireside chat included insights from leading experts from diverse sectors and disciplines. Wenhui Lim:Director at Spark Architects; demonstrated the power of AI as a design tool; Frantz Braha: Chief Growth Officer of Saladstop!; showed how the digital process has enabled the largest healthy food chain, SaladStop Group, to grow; Liam Bray: Director for Portfolio Management (Asia) of Turner & Townsend; considered how digital mapping is yielding far greater operational and maintenance efficiencies; George Loh: Associate Vice President, Research and Technology at National University of Singapore; highlighted how the ‘valley of death’ between academia and industry can be bridged through digital living laboratories; and Sunil M K: Director for business development (Asia) of Bentley Systems, brought a digital twin to life in his Siemensstadt case study.