Aims : To describe consortium-based approaches to evaluating complex respiratory problems – the sociology of collaboration will also be discussed; to describe the difficulties associated with seeing, measuring, and understanding the processes in the small airways that operate at small-length scales in diseases such as asthma and COPD; to discuss how imaging approaches such as functional hyperpolarised 3He/129Xe imaging can provide new insights into the microstructure of the small airways in asthma and COPD; and to discuss how all of these approaches are being used to develop the first digital models of the small airways.