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The process outlined above is an extremely complex form of integrated project delivery. By definition IPD leverages early contributions of knowledge and expertise through the utilization of new technologies, allowing all team members to better realize their highest potentials while expanding the value they provide throughout the project lifecycle. By using existing design contributions and utilizing BIM technology, an independent entity can then manage and coordinate the information into interchangeable modules. To take it a step further, these modules could be pre-arranged into recommended configurations with additional options.

This database of recommended configurations (totaling 25,139,467) can each be revised by the owner to include any of the 999 possible considerations that were not chosen in the top 0.1% of quality according to the system. For instance, a recommended model may call for Low emissivity glass, as a specification of the “glazing” component of the 15 original components, but the owner may prefer to save money on low-e glass because he lives in a more temperate zone that is not subject to heat loss in the winter. The “design” process can then occur in a multitude of ways.

The Owner could hire a consultant to facilitate the traditional schematic design process and then make recommendations based on the owner’s preferences. The second option is that the system could be selfnavigated by the owner. Imagine going to a website and entering your zip code. This information automatically reduces the amount of possible options by prioritizing models that are configured to allow the proper amount of solar gain and summer shade. The zip code can also begin to analyze building codes, styles of surrounding buildings, and property values to provide more feedback to the owner.

 Subsequent screens can prompt for additional information including number of rooms, material palettes, and accessibility needs. The idea would be to develop an interface that is so user-friendly, and convenient that anyone could visit the site and leave with an image of their configuration on their land. Just as in real estate after configuring their custom design, the system offers them a chance to place a deposit to ensure that no one else will purchase their same design. If they decline, the system takes the user feedback to suggest alternate configurations to the database. The future of building construction will more closely resemble shopping online for cars, from the vantage point of the owner.

     In order for this system to work, the primary focus must be the quality of the designs. If the craftsmanship of any component is lacking, so will any end configuration that uses that module design, and consequently the validity of the entire system will be compromised. For this it will be critical to adopt a system of managing the “art”. A great way to understand this is by observing the stock photography industry. Getty Images has established a strong precedent in the business of managing artists’ rights. The agency manages an archive of over 70 million stock photographs that are made available to clients at fees that vary upon the usage. This service is incredibly valuable to creative professionals, the media and corporate entities alike. It allows them access to the rights to use photographs that are perfectly catered to their needs. They can select an image that already exists and download it instantly, whether It’s the work of a photographer that is deceased or lives on the other side of the globe. This allows them to bypass the antiquated process of hiring a photographer, paying him for his services and hoping that the end result is what they desire.

The business model of the photographer is not much different than that of the architect. You may even say that advances in photo technology and applications such as Photoshop create the same challenge for professional photographers as AutoCAD and Google Sketch-up create for Architects. This business model is also invaluable to the photographer. It enables the artist to focus solely on the quality of his work while expanding the breadth of his exposure to the entire world. By adopting this model for the BIM database, it gives architects the chance to submit ideas that create solutions to problems that may not exist in his realm of consciousness, but are perfect for some client. It also assures that he will be compensated for the use of his ideas. The architect will become the intellectual proprietor, earning money at the click of a mouse. The promise of earnings is his incentive to provide the highest quality design to clients, just like the stock photographer.

    The last component of this solution is the building process. As we’ve discussed before, BIM technology allots many opportunities for increased efficiency and savings on the building site. This is the nature of the IPD methodology. By having all of the solutions perfected on the front end, construction will become as simple as color-by-number. There will be virtually no need for RFIs, inspections, or supervision from the designer. Information provided by the BIM model would be so precise that construction process could begin to more closely resemble the manufacturing process, harkening back to the assembly line.

In addition to increasing the speed and accuracy of construction, this information will eliminate the production of waste on the site. Clients and builders will save money because materials will be purchased to the exact specifications. As the system gains popularity, there may even be incentives to make the modules available in kits. Building components can be pre-assembled in manageable units; think tilt-up construction. This application is especially promising for emergency needs such as disaster relief and solving the global need for solutions to homeless and problems associated with informal settlements.

    The future of design and construction will be dictated by technology and the need for and increase in shared information, efficiency, and the value that it adds. Building Information Modeling technology has all of the capabilities necessary to leverage current and future banks of data that can provide a multifaceted and mutually beneficial infrastructure to owners, designers and constructors alike. By utilizing complete sets of building data, Architects can shift from the arduous task of managing an office and simply focus on creating new designs and profiting from their ideas. With access to this refined data, the construction process becomes so highly efficient that the traditional issues associated with the process are eliminated completely.

Builders will be able to more accurately manage budgets, schedules and waste because they will not have to play the usual guessing games. The greatest benefactor perhaps to this technology is the client. The owner benefits by seeing a finished product and understanding everything about it before it ever exists, rendering the decision making process easier than ever imagined. The term client will become more universal with services being extended to a far greater extent of individuals in the World, including those who benefit from the efforts of governmental and non-profit organizations’ efforts to relieve global housing issues.

It has been said, “nothing is a new creation, rather everything is a re-interpretation of a design that came before it.” By leveraging state-of-the-art technology and interpreting the business models of successful entities, the design and construction industry can provide better solutions, increase efficiency and improve client satisfaction.

–James K. Holder II

James is a Professional Photographer, Architect, and Designer living and working in Atlanta GA. His website is @ James K. Holder II Photograpy and his Blog is The Eclectic Rogue.

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 Let’s refer back to the color survey from earlier. If you remember the two types of respondents were non-designers and designers. If we further analyze and compare the information we may be able to determine an appropriate methodology or process to support this alternative design process. Non-designers, each listed 5 of the 6 primary and secondary colors, where only one of the designers did, furthermore among nondesigners 2/3 listed all of the 8 colors of the original Crayola set (compared to only 1 of the designers who alone listed all 8). This is important to understand because it shows that out of an unlimited number of options, the nondesigner’s point of reference is so basic that the typical person would not be able to generate a complex design. In this instance Crayola’s formula, although very familiar as a brand that has 99% name recognition in U.S. consumer households, would not be a strong model to adopt.

     At its furthest extent, they only have 150 color options. With only 150 options, there would be a considerably limited amount of options with even less room for design discretion. For instance if you were to take the three primary colors (red, yellow, and blue) and blend them together in equal parts you would end up with brown. Any additional color blended to this mix would only yield a varying shade of brown. Also not every combination of colors would be favorable, so you would have to limit the options to a level of discretion, let’s say that we want to design to 99.9% scrutiny, meaning that only 1 of every 1000 options would be considered a viable option.

Let’s analyze the Crayola condition, with 150 total options in combinations of 3 to 99.9% scrutiny would be evaluated as follows [(150!/(3!(150-3)!))/1000]= 551 options This means that with Crayola’s 150 colors, any one could only ever create 551 unique combinations in one order to the top 99.9th percentile of selection. Hence the need for an alternative method, one that is more attune to the designer’s process.

Consider paint mixing. If you go to your local hardware store in search of red paint, what happens? You are not likely to find a gallon of paint labeled simply as “red.” You will be inundated with swatches. These swatches will be varying shades within the same color family. You may see a dark-red, light-red, orange-red, brick red and so on and so forth. They may even be adorned with nicknames including heat, rage, fast, peppery, and fiery. Once you select your swatch, you hand it to the paint mixer and he will invariably ask you to select a finish “flat, matte, eggshell, satin, semi-gloss, or gloss?” Once you have decided the mixer will grab the corresponding can of base-paint, place the open can in the mixer and type the color profile (name) into the computer, which then dispenses drops of varying pigments that, when mixed, will transform a standard bucket of ordinary paint into your “candy apple red corvette convertible with wind in hair” shade of red. These technologies, along with color selections for almost all design decisions that relate to color, are based on the Pantone Matching System.

Pantone is a corporation that has specialized in color matching for the past 47 years. In that time they have amassed a database of over 3 thousand distinct colors each of which can be applied with multiple finishes and are capable of being further customized into metallics and various other styles. The system has become so ubiquitous among designers and those with discriminate color tastes that Pantone tags are even used to denote the colors of national flags.

The Scottish Flag for example is known as “Pantone 300.” In all Pantone has exactly 3,114 distinct colors in two sets. By using the same methodology outlined in the Crayola condition the Pantone condition would exceed 5 million distinct options with 99.9% scrutiny

= [(3114!/(3!(3114-3)!) /1000]= 5,027,893

The Pantone condition, for all intents and purposes would be a viable solution. Each of the distinct colors of the original set of 3,114 is composed of variable amounts of each of 15 pigments. If these 15 criteria could be interpreted to represent 15 design constructs including (cost, size, sustainability, frame, materials, glazing, floor plan, height, energy strategy, color, roof pitch, accessibility, recycle ability, and envelope) they could then be used to identify and develop 3114 distinct modules using archival data from the BIM database. Each of these would have additional factors of customizability. If you were to then arrange three of these modules into unique groups of 3 and only selected 1 of every 1000 possible designs you would have 5,0272,893 combinations. If you were to take any of these and provide the option of adding an additional module, that number goes to 25,139,467, and given the option of an additional module for a total of 5 the number of possible distinct combinations at 99.9% scrutiny goes above 150 Million.

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The answer lies in one additional key similarity amongst the members of group B; they are all designers (two with undergraduate study in architecture and one in fine arts). Their years of training and experience (although few) were enough to enable them to think outside of the box. Though very anecdotal in it’s calculation, this survey provides a very compelling basis for the need of the architect. Color is just one of the many design considerations that goes into the development of a building, and is usually thought to be a superficial consideration at that. The architect must be able to recommend a site-orientation strategy, structural system, floor plan, material palette, among countless other design decisions. The color metaphor simply illustrates the point that I made earlier: “applications can interpret all of the skills necessary to develop a beautiful design, but only to the ability of the user.” If because of lack of training, creativity and exposure the self-taught designers are not able to think outside of the box, design will be relegated to a very limited scope of available mental references. Houses will be designed with only the self-taught designer’s primitive set of design ideas.

  The Architect’s problem becomes understanding his value proposal to the construction industry. The last two years have been detrimental to the global construction industry and specifically to the architect. According to figures from the Office for National Statistics [UK], between February 2008 and February 2009, the number of architects claiming jobseekers’ allowance rose by 760% from 150 to 1,290. In the United States the national unemployment rate is steadily climbing; in January, it hit 7.6 percent, with the architecture and engineering industry sector shedding some 9,600 jobs. As credit remains frozen, and work dries up in the U.S. and abroad, firms large and small are cutting staff. The demand for the architect as we know it will never be the same. Once the market rebounds and we begin to see an increase in bank lending and subsequent increase in demand for design and construction, the industry will have to develop a new business model with more attention to optimal use of technology, sustainability and cost efficiency.

Building Information Modeling is the future of design and construction. BIM technology is capable of many things; at present the databases are being used to streamline the construction process by adding additional layers of information to the existing 2 or 3-dimensional drawings. This information may include collision detection, analysis of construction processes and tracking of the building schedule. This methodology is beneficial to all parties involved because it develops a highly sophisticated preemptive success strategy that typically results in cost savings that outweigh the upfront expenses of utilizing the technology. Advanced virtual design and construction entails further building analysis, taking into account many of the operational factors of the building including passive-solar strategy, energy consumption and other facility management issues such as building maintenance and up-keep. Models have been used to recommend, for instance, atypical cooling systems, which may have more upfront costs, but provide highly efficient service to the building’s inhabitants and therefore sees returns on investment, which can also be tracked by the BIM analysis. While these innovations may be exciting and seem to have great benefits, I find it intriguing that perhaps the most beneficial feature of BIM is the recording, and archiving of building information in the form of as-builts and maintenance/owners models. The storing and retrieval of this data will prove to give a critical advantage to architects and builders alike in the coming era of design and construction.

Imagine for a moment if Imhotep, the master builder of the Stepped Pyramid in Saqqara, Egypt, had access to BIM and was able to use this technology to facilitate his design and construction process. The world would be quite a different place. We would have irrefutable evidence of the methods of creating one of the most fascinating structures on earth by the World’s first recorded architect. This would also have set a precedent and value around shared information and building on existing technology that has to this point in the building sector not been realized. Moving forward, designers and construction professionals alike will have to take advantages of opportunities to learn from each other, as well as the past, and BIM technology provides the perfectframework to do so.

One fundamental axiom of design is that “nothing is a new creation, rather everything is a re-interpretation of a design that came before it.” Many creative types would argue against this, but it provides a strong basis for the future of the design industry. Precedents are a major component in generating a design. This may include analysis of surrounding buildings’ styles and material palettes, as well as understanding the design strategies of exemplary buildings that have come before it. If care is taken to collect and properly archive building and construction data in the form of BIM models, the industry could see revolutionary advances in proficiency, reduction of costs and
alacrity in the construction of all sorts of buildings. In shot, applying the technology that is available today and adopting a business model of a more productive industry, the building sector may see major advances in the coming years.

When pressed to recall a single innovation in business that revolutionized productivity by making optimal use of the available technology, the glaring example to me, and perhaps to most Americans is the invention of the assembly line by Henry Ford. This was in essence a method of taking pre-fabricated components and using a linear methodology to assemble identical products from start to finish. There are many lessons that can be learned and adapted with BIM technology and applied to the building industry.

The first major difference is that design, as we know it, is not a linear process. It is very creative, responsive and interactive. A good design is a solution to a series of problems that work cohesively to form an ideal finished product. The second is that, by and large, no owner-when given the option-is willing to purchase an identical design or cookiecutter replica house, building or structure. In design, as we have seen since it’s infancy has a need to be unique. Interestingly enough, these two differences share a strong correlation with causation. It is by virtue of the “linear” process, that the end result is an “identical” set of products. If however you were to interpret chunks of design, let’s call them “modules,” from a large database of BIM archives as the pre-fabricated parts associated with the assembly line you would significantly increase proficiency in the design process. Tapping into this well of information also eliminates the checklist nature of the process. Completion of a project would not be determined by a pre-determined list of components, but would leverage the strengths and benefits of each component for the betterment of the overall design. Lastly, the process must somehow mimic the designer’s process, some components of the design must be more important than others, but must all work cohesively, much like color.

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