As drone technology continues to advance, building owners and designers face a rapidly evolving threat landscape. How drones are changing security planning—and what the future may hold for protecting facilities, critical infrastructure, and public spaces—is explored in this episode featuring Ryan Searles, leader of IMEG’s Security Consulting Group.

“Drones have really advanced and are now causing very serious security threats to even the private sector,” Ryan says. From delivering contraband over prison fences to gathering corporate intelligence and threatening crowded venues, drones can create risks across a wide range of building types. Healthcare facilities, educational institutions, manufacturing plants, and critical infrastructure all require analysis of how drones could access sensitive areas or interfere with essential systems.

“It's all about where do you and how do you protect those critical infrastructure systems,” Ryan says. It’s also about when: For owners, architects, and engineers, determining drone threat risk and planning for the appropriate security measures is best done early in the design phase of a project.

Early coordination allows detection and deterrence technologies to be integrated more seamlessly and at less cost than waiting until after construction. These systems can include radar, radio-frequency detection, and believe it or not, netting. Ryan’s team incorporated the low-tech material into the security design for a project in the Middle East, specifying fine webbing over the building’s architectural openings—preventing drones from entering and not compromising the structure’s appearance.

Emerging counter-drone solutions include interceptor drones capable of identifying and flying to an unauthorized drone, deploying a net, and bringing it back for investigation.

In all situations, Ryan says, security measures must be proportionate to the risks.

“First let's figure out what posture and level of security you want,” he says. “The objective is to establish appropriate protection without turning every facility into a fortress.”

For existing buildings, security teams may need to retrofit detection and response systems. In healthcare settings, these systems must also account for helicopter operations and emergency medical flights, requiring trained personnel and carefully established response procedures.

On the positive side, drones are also becoming useful tools for a growing number of legitimate operations, including healthcare deliveries, perimeter monitoring, and various industrial applications.

Artificial intelligence, of course, is expanding the applications—both for good and for bad. Counter measures, however, may be one step behind when a new type of threat emerges. For example, detection systems can identify drone signals and support responses, but the newer threat of autonomous drone swarms presents a more complex challenge.

“A single drone, OK, we can deal with that,” says Ryan. “A hundred drones, your defense system may only be able to stop one or two of them.”

“The defense side and the detection side will definitely catch up,” Ryan adds, but responding to ever-emerging new threats will require constant vigilance and counter-measure adaptation and advances.

For building owners, designers, and the general public, drones have become and will remain part of the landscape, says Ryan. “It's just becoming part of everyday life.”

Read more about defending against drones on the IMEG blog.

This episode examines the use of extended reality in the AEC industry through the eyes of Abby Coleman, winner of Healthcare Design magazine’s HCD10 Industry MVP Award.

As IMEG’s extended reality specialist, Abby has spent the last four years creating immersive experiences people can step into. Her role, she says, is to help “engineers and, most importantly, clients use augmented and virtual reality to thoroughly understand a proposed design.” To date she has facilitated or supported more than 5,000 such experiences for IMEG project stakeholders.

Abby frames extended reality, or XR, as a way of moving design conversations out of flat, two-dimensional drawings and into a space where stakeholders can react instinctively. Once participants get into a headset, she says, “you can just hear the ‘oohs’ and ‘ahs’—like, ‘Oh, wow, I can really see the benefit of using this technology for design.” Such experiences, she says, provide participants with a thorough understanding and visualization of spaces as designed. “It really helps them make better, more informed, and confident decisions before anything gets built.”

Abby categories XR experiences into three levels, depending on the audience and the project. “Level one would probably be just using augmented reality on your mobile device,” she says, describing use cases such as jobsite visits and groundbreaking ceremonies. Level two is “using our VR software on PCs to really just visualize it on a screen.” Level three, the most immersive, would be “stepping into” and “looking around” a space using a VR headset, with designers being able to move elements in real time based on the suggestions of the viewers, e.g., healthcare clinicians.

“Once folks are in that immersive level three experience, we definitely do have the capability to move our live Revit elements,” Abby says. A Mayo Clinic XR experience, for example, used immersive VR to show multiple boom layouts and check clearances and usability—based on the clinicians’ feedback—before construction began. In another XR experience, IMEG led a VR workshop for more than 50 Henry Ford Health clinicians, putting them into a future smart patient room featuring the healthcare information technology suggested by the designers for the project.

In these and other instances, the ability to adjust design in real time helps stakeholders evaluate options in a more meaningful way than a marked-up plan ever could.

Looking ahead, Abby imagines a future in which XR becomes even more powerful as it incorporates artificial intelligence. Instead of making adjustments manually during XR design reviews teams will simply use voice prompts to ask AI to make changes in the model instantaneously. “I definitely think AI and XR are going to cross paths,” she says.

Watch IMEG extended reality experience videos of a patient room, conference room, and job site visits.

In the final installment of a three-part series on IMEG’s 2026 Whole Carbon Action Plan (WCAP), senior sustainability and energy engineer Laura Hagan discusses how the company is tackling embodied carbon in structural systems.

IMEG’s carbon reduction journey began four years ago when the firm became a signatory to SE 2050, the structural engineering industry’s initiative to eliminate embodied carbon in structures by the year 2050. That original structural-focused plan has evolved into IMEG’s broader WCAP, which now also incorporates MEP and infrastructure disciplines.

Laura, who also is a structural engineer, says SE 2050 “is a great program to be a part of because it really challenges us to be accountable for how we are designing and how we are trying to reduce embodied carbon.” Critical to this effort is first being able to measure the carbon impacts across IMEG’s large national project portfolio.

“We are in the process of trying to figure out what our designs mean in terms of carbon emissions,” Laura says. “Unfortunately, with the size of IMEG, it's not possible for us to do a whole building lifecycle assessment on every project the firm designs. So instead, we are using material schedules we created in Revit to calculate the quantities of materials in a structural model. Then we are going to transfer the quantities to an internal IMEG database that will multiply them by global warming potential (GWP) factors. This will give us a preliminary high-level assessment of the amount of embodied carbon a structural project is going to emit.” IMEG also will analyze the data for benchmarking purposes, she adds.

“When we are able to make this connection with the internal database, the designers and structural engineers will be able to see, in real time, the projected embodied carbon emissions of the quantities of materials that they are designing with,” Laura says. Engineers can then test different framing layouts, slab thicknesses, or material quantities and immediately see the impact on emissions. “Anyone who’s familiar with embodied carbon knows that if you can reduce the quantity of the material that you have, you’re going to reduce the amount of embodied carbon that you have.”

Laura says even small specification changes can produce meaningful results at scale. She references a case study involving slab-on-grade concrete design in which reducing slab thickness or lowering concrete strength produced a 10 percent to possibly 20 percent reduction in embodied carbon for that building element.

“It’s a great example of low-hanging fruit,” she says. “If you can reduce your quantity and it still performs perfectly for its structural capacities and serviceability requirements, you are going to save carbon and hopefully you’ll save some money too.”

Looking ahead, Hagan says innovation in low-carbon materials is crucial for achieving the long-term SE 2050 goal of net zero structural systems. “Innovation has to happen on the material side, then people have to start designing with it, and it has to make it into building codes as an allowable system. That all takes time, and then you have to build the demand for using the material on projects.”

Laura’s motivation comes from the engineering mindset itself. “We are problem solvers,” she says. “This is basically a giant problem that we don’t have all the solutions to, but it’s something that if we work together and continue to provide pressure to the industry we can reduce embodied carbon.

“People are recognizing that this is important and trying to address it. That’s what keeps me excited and what makes me happy to be doing this work and continuing to push for more every day.”

To learn more, listen to part one and part two of this series or read IMEG’s 2026 Whole Carbon Action Plan.