Speaker Q&A: Russell Bunn, Arup - Future Infrastructure Summit 2023

Speaker Q&A

Russell is the Regional Leader for Arup Australasia’s Transport, Environment & Resources CAD Stream, leading group of exceptional and highly motivated designers and drafters. His design experience covers a variety of complex road design projects in New South Wales and Australasia. This experience includes planning and detailed design of both major and minor infrastructure projects for public and private clients.

Tell us a bit about your background and how you came to work in digital construction?

My background is in drawing team management and the CAD/drafting space has undergone massive changes in the last 20 years and this pace has accelerated exponentially recently as mobile workstations have become more powerful. This pace has moved us closer to a completely digital workflow and the addition of tools like Bluebeam Revu have meant we can optimise those workflows easily and effectively.

What is the most exciting thing about your role?

My current role as a regional leader at Arup gives me the flexibility to work across multiple streams and connect people to meaningful solutions to their problems.

Can you tell us a bit about the projects you’re working on and what role innovation and technology is playing?

Working in Sydney at the moment is such an exciting time in infrastructure with so many fantastic projects in some phase of development simultaneously. I am working across so many there are too many to list and this provides an amazing opportunity for innovation and making sure the technology is fit for purpose. The projects happening now, coupled with the technology embedded in apps like Bluebeam has given us the scope to be more efficient than ever.

Tell us about a recent innovation or technology that you’ve been most impressed by.

The development of more powerful mobile workstation technology has meant CAD users have been able to move away from needing bulky desktop solutions and enabled us to be more agile and able to work flexibly to improve our work/life balance and ultimately our productivity.

What challenge in your work life would you most like a technology or process to help solve?

Where to start. Having faster wireless communication that can match a wired connection would be a massive help especially where you’re based away from a metropolitan area in regional Australia.

How important is the Future Infrastructure Summit to the industry?

Having a summit like this is a fantastic way to bring people together to share, discuss, debate and foster the collaborative spirit that will be so crucial to address the massive challenges delivering our infrastructure in a sustainable, cost effective way.

Can you tell us a bit about your session at Future Infrastructure Summit 2019?

My session will show how Arup has applied the simplicity of Bluebeam Revu to digitally transform our traditional paper based processes and enhance our delivery of our project documentation. The ability to transform the PDF into a container of digital information that can be used to enhance so many other processes and workflows has been key to meeting the needs of our projects.

What do you see as the most interesting and exciting future applications for digital technology in construction?

The possibilities of what 3D printing can do to streamline and enhance how things are constructed excites me a lot and what efficiencies this will create to manage the cost of complex infrastructure in the future.