A researcher. A lead digital engineer. A mother.

My path into construction didn't start in construction at all.

I began as an interior designer in Portugal. I noticed something most people walked past: many homes weren't designed around how people actually live in them. From around 2003 I was using 3D Studio Max and AutoCAD to walk clients through photorealistic renders before a single wall was built. I was always optimising space, without losing sight of what the client needed.

When I moved to the UK, that career didn't transfer. My degree was in fashion design, not architecture, and the interior design door closed.

So I kept designing in other ways. I worked with an architect on building regulations and planning, measuring buildings and designing interiors. I ran my own design practice, delivering a house extension, a site development model, and a wet room for the University of Wales Trinity Saint David. I produced visualisations and walkthroughs for an architecture firm.

Then I went back to university: Building Studies, then Project and Construction Management. The subject came easily, and a new path opened.

I joined ISG as a BIM Coordinator during the final year of my MSc in BIM in Design, Construction and Operations at UWE Bristol, modelling structure and architecture on projects including Amazon Avonmouth, Darlington and a Nationwide building. I also learned laser scanning there, a field I loved and never fully returned to.

Around 2016, I told colleagues something they didn't take seriously yet: construction engineers wouldn't keep depending on proprietary systems someone else built. The industry was limited by what those systems allowed.

At Wernick Buildings, as BIM Manager, I stopped only using tools and started building them. I delivered the company's first combined structural, architectural and fit-out coordination model, its first clash detection process, and its first 4D assembly animation, used to train shop-floor staff. In 2019 I built the company's first augmented reality application in Unity, with 360° walkthroughs and QR codes linking tender documents to 3D models.

My PhD began as one problem, backed by a director who believed in the work. When circumstances changed, I found new direction. By then I was working on a major UK nuclear infrastructure programme, where I saw the coordination problems I'd met at Wernick at a far larger scale. Converting a BIM model for fabrication took 14 to 16 hours and routinely lost data. But conversion time was only the symptom. The real problem was that the manufacturing information fabricators need (hole features, tolerances, assembly relationships) never survived the journey from the model. I redirected my research to solve it.

Six years later, OffBIM is the result. Not a side project, but the culmination of everything before it, from interior design to digital construction.

The prediction I made in 2016 took a decade to become real. OffBIM gives fabricators the manufacturing information they should have had from the model all along. That is the difference between an industry that adapts to its tools and one that finally has tools built for how it works.

We are in an era where people with deep domain knowledge can build those tools themselves. I built mine. The industry doesn't have to wait for someone else to build the rest.

If you fabricate from BIM models and lose information on the way, book a demo.