by Willow Williams CF, MSc, Founder, ThreadPoint | Global Education Lead, Women in BIM
Every time we send a message, stream a film or ask an AI a question, something physical happens.
A signal travels through fibre. A server in a real building processes the request. Power, cooling and highly skilled people keep it all running.
Most of us never see any of it.
We talk about “the cloud” as though it floats somewhere above us, when in reality it lives in some of the largest and fastest-growing buildings being constructed today.
Helping people see and understand that hidden world has become my life’s work.
This year, that work reached a milestone I am still catching up with: I was awarded a Churchill Fellowship.
The Churchill Fellowship enables UK citizens to learn from outstanding international practice and bring those ideas home to create positive change across the UK.
My Fellowship will take me to the USA, the UAE, the Netherlands, Sweden and Denmark to explore a simple but important question:
How are other countries helping communities understand the physical infrastructure behind AI, cloud computing and digital life?
I’ll be looking at how education, digital inclusion, community engagement and workforce pathways can make these systems more visible, and what we in the UK can learn.
I call this work infrastructure literacy.
It sits at the heart of ThreadPoint, the education and research organisation I founded, and of my children’s book Where the Internet Goes to Sleep, which introduces five- to nine-year-olds to the idea that the internet isn’t weather in the sky. It depends on real buildings, fibre, servers, electricity, cooling systems and the people who keep them running.
There is one distinction I keep coming back to, and it is one of the reasons this Fellowship matters so much to me.
Community engagement asks people to respond to infrastructure.
Infrastructure literacy helps them understand it.As data centres become increasingly connected to AI, healthcare, education and public services, that difference matters more than ever.
You cannot meaningfully consult communities about infrastructure they have never been helped to understand.
For those of us working across the built environment, this is not an abstract conversation.
It is our work.
Data centres are among the most significant construction programmes underway today. With the growth of AI, they are raising important questions around energy, planning, land use, public services,
skills and community benefit.
We design them.
We coordinate them.
We model them.
We build them.
That means our profession is uniquely placed to help translate the invisible into something communities can understand with confidence.
One of the reasons I wanted to share this through Women in BIM is that our community already understands what it means to make complexity accessible.
Whether through BIM, information management, digital engineering or project delivery, we spend our careers translating technical information so that other people can make better decisions.
Infrastructure literacy takes that same skill beyond project teams and into our schools, libraries and communities.
That is the bridge I hope to build through this Fellowship.
My ambition is not simply to publish research. I want the findings to lead to practical recommendations for schools, councils, policymakers, community organisations and built environment professionals.
Understanding the systems behind our digital lives should not be reserved for specialists.
I did not arrive here by a straight line.
My journey has taken me through the built environment, information management and the data centre sector. Every step has reinforced the same belief:
If a child can understand where the internet goes to sleep, then so can all of us.
Infrastructure shapes all of our lives.Understanding it should belong to all of us.
My Fellowship starts with listening
Before travelling overseas, I am trying to understand where we are today.
If you work across the built environment, digital infrastructure, engineering, information management or technology, I would love to hear your perspective.
The Infrastructure Literacy Survey 2026 takes around five minutes and will help shape the recommendations that come out of this Fellowship.
If you think it is worthwhile, I would really appreciate you sharing it with colleagues too.
Industry Survey
research.thethreadpoint.org/industry
And if you would like friends or family to be part of the research as well, there is a public version here:
Public Survey
research.thethreadpoint.org/public
You can learn more about infrastructure literacy at: thethreadpoint.org
For research, education or partnership enquiries: institute@thethreadpoint.org
ThreadPoint | Building understanding alongside infrastructure.
Willow Williams CF, MSc is the founder of ThreadPoint, author of Where the Internet Goes to Sleep, Churchill Fellow and Global Education Lead at Women in BIM.
