Hack for Good

Shifting the AI Conversation

Last Tuesday, we hosted ‘Hack for Good’ — a hands-on workshop that explored how AI can be applied positively across the built environment. The session was co-led by Society Building members Pablo Duran Millan and Megan Greig of Elliott Wood, alongside Tom Goldsmith of Hoppa Technologies.

AI is already shaping how projects are designed, delivered and managed. But the narrative usually focuses on the bad: bias, skyrocketing energy use and job displacement. These concerns are real, but they are only part of the picture.

There is also a growing body of work where AI is being applied to accelerate material discovery, improve biodiversity monitoring and enable circular construction. Hack for Good asked what if we used our collective knowledge of AI and the construction industry for good?

The Hack

Alongside 35 peers — including project managers, architects, software designers, engineers and marketers — we explored how these emerging approaches might translate into both day-to-day practice and industry-wide change.

The session followed a simple structure:

Idea → Develop → Implement → Present

Groups began with paper and pen, mapping systems and interrogating assumptions.

Working across disciplines created momentum; ideas evolved quickly through discussion, challenge and iteration. The value was not in polished outputs, but in shared capability-building.

The Ideas

If the dominant narrative around AI is cautionary, Hack for Good was a small attempt to rebalance it. Not by ignoring risk, but by testing what responsible, outcome-driven use could look like in practice.

Team’s AI applications included forecasting when buildings reach the end of their useful life and identifying materials that could be diverted from waste streams into new builds; ‘DACOW!’ — an AI-powered clerk of works; tools for generating fuzzy boundaries; and even a reimagined, built-environment-specific successor to the Microsoft paperclip.

Hack for Good was not about proving that AI is inherently good, but testing how it might be used well – collectively, critically and with intent.

Thank you to everyone who joined us. We hope to host more sessions like this in the future.

A Hack for Good – A Poem

Society Building, London | 24/02/26

AI tracks the things that want to be found,
Materials whisper, “Reuse me now.”
The wheel pleads, “Stop reinventing,”
While past ideas hide under “final_vow”.

AGI waits, politely ready,
Speed questions why it’s running at all.
And somewhere, unread but flawless,
The tolerances sulk in the appendix.