Googlizing the AEC Industry

IPD-BIM and SMART Culture Launches AEC Industry to New Levels

I recently posted an article "Googlizing the AEC Industry" on our NoSilos.com site outlining the basis of a new series of live seminar and workshop events to be held in 2014 and 2015. In keeping with our goal of breaking down silos of information and operation within companies and project, we are offering a full two-year training effort called "The Smart Built Culture" to transform those who attend this series. There will be other webinar and free website information and presentations to inform our readership about these resources and presentations so, even if you can't make the live events, you will be able to get some of the benefits of our research and experience over the past ten years in this emerging business model.

Hospitals and a Barcalounger?? What happened to my hospital?

As an ex-CIO of a small healthcare insurance company. I remember attending some of the earliest conferences on the future of healthcare informatics beginning in 1984. The big discussion was the EMR or electronic medical record and privacy being implemented by HIPPA. Today you hardly go in any sizable clinic or community hospital without having some information collected about your health status which is stored in a form of and EMR. Even my small-town MD uses an Ipad to take notes for her records about my health and to look up information while we talk about a health issue. No she isn't one of those 'just out of school' MD's but in her 60's and ready to retire. So EMR's are in use and here to stay as they take on many different guises. UPDATE: Google announces diabetes monitoring with contacts

Is 57% waste real in delivery of projects in the Built Environment?

What is the highest portion of waste in construction projects?

It appears that rework tops the list. The data show that rework often has more than one cause. A recent CII study called "A Guide to Construction Rework Reduction" reveals that the biggest contributor to rework, at 25.4%, is scheduling, followed by issues related to materials and equipment (19%), design and engineering (14.6%) and instruction/monitoring (14.5%). Cutting costs too much can also drive rework. To save money, for example, some architects and engineers use old designs or templates for new projects, and those designs may have problems that were fixed on a previous job but remain in the original design and are passed along to a new one.

At the beginning of this year a conversation began between myself and collaboration principles of NoSilos.com. The reports from the Building SMART Alliance and the Construction Institute and others have been purporting A huge percentage of waste in our industry. While I cringe at the huge numbers, the reality is a lot of that number is infrastructure costs which are inflated due to the litigious nature of our business. Examples such as insurance, performance bonding and financing directly increase the cost due to the risky nature of the current methods we use to deliver Built Environment  projects. So eliminating these excessive costs will be difficult until lenders, insurers and risk assessment folks change their policies to favor less risky arrangements.

That said, the Cll study cited in the ENR article gives us a glimpse behind the numbers from yet another perspective. The study points out that rework, aka failure that manifests itself at the tail end of a project, is spawned by many different failure mechanisms. Bad schedules, materials, equipment, design, execution, supervision etc. etc. account for rework BUT most rework arises from more than one failure mechanism. Further, rework is merely the visible tip of the iceberg. The real failure points lie submerged and ignored.

If necessity is the mother of invention then crisis is the father of failure. And we see the father of failure sowing wild oats all over! And let us count the ways:

•  RFI's
• Energy
• Re-work
• Waste removal
• Poor site logistics
• Over priced construction materials
• Over priced construction equipment
• Poor delivery coordination
• and more, more, more.....

At NoSilos.com we have a metric we use called ROF or Return on Failure. Sort of like the Return on Investment metric known in the financial world, but in reverse. The value of failure compounded over time creates its own wave of increased cascade of failure. 

So how much can be reduced. Past experience shows a possible reduction on privately funded projects of at least 10% and more likely around 15% when we used a modestly integrated design and delivery process not even close to true IPD process. The key to these numbers was a combination of great communication, clear goals and some judicious use of technology to help make the process a bit easier. 

The bottom line, from our perspective, is that waste and inefficiency are known realities by key stakeholders in every sector of the economy regardless of their willingness to admit to the presence of the waste. We bring solutions to identify the differences between uncontrollable and controllable waste. What our clients do to reduce those costs is up to them. There is a vast opportunity for every company to reduce their ROF and increase their ROI to levels not seen before. 

Utility of the Future (UTOF) "Water Water where is it? There's not a drop to drink!"

A couple of months ago a report was issued entitled  “The Water Resources Utility of the Future: A Blueprint for Action.” was recently released by a coalition of organizations: The National Association of Clean Water Agencies (NACWA), the Water Environment Research Foundation (WERF), and the Water Environment Federation (WEF).

Article linked from Water Efficiency Blog. http://www.waterefficiency.net/WE/Blogs/1619.aspx

Some of you know from reading previous posts on this blog, I have contended that diversified water treatment is as important as the diversified renewable energy movement which has been afoot for about the last decade or more. In my mind, it is unfortunate we have not paid attention to the underlying infrastructure and social connection good drinking water has on our communities. 

The EPA is warning us that in less than a decade or so, there will be significantly more cities in dire straits to provide safe drinking water in their communities. This report echoes this call to actions. Our current state rules on water production and the often arcane water rights laws which change from state to state often cause difficulties for the emerging, smaller scale treatment options available. Greywater rules are one other point of confusion where it is actually illegal to use this water at all and in most other areas it is severely regulated as a resource. Here in the desert SW we have a more open mind to the value of water, but only slightly. We may have some of the more forward-looking legislation in Arizona, but the public is not educated about the significant impacts these laws could have on our severe drought conditions.  

Using some of the recent filtration and treatment technologies which began in the NASA science labs back over 25 years ago we are beginning to see commercially viable solutions which can take briny water and turn it into higher quality water than found in our local utility pipes.

Yet setting water quality aside it is often more of a quantity problem and here is where the leaky pipe syndrome is raising it's ugly head. Some local utilities have a leakage rate over 30% in some network areas which is a huge burden for the overall system. Fixing far-flung and aging networks is expensive and so are put off until they go beyond being a nuisance to a health hazard. 

How will a diversified water treatment and production effort change the UTOF? Instead of larger, hard to manage and maintain, should we be be looking at smaller, more diversified and dispersed treatment and production solutions? 

UTOF report indicates we need a significant change in thinking and implementation of both the treatment and production sides of water. With more and more communities facing difficult water supply and treatment issues, these questions aren't for the future, but for us to grapple with now. To be sure they are difficult, complex, wicked problems and take the efforts of entire regions and the stakeholders of multiple communities to arrive at possible strategies and solution paths. No one process or solution will be a "silver bullet" in any community. 

This is another part to the connections of thoughts about the Built Environment and the elements surrounding the efforts we take as humans to change and shape the environment we work in. A string of ideas, in this instance relating to clean water, the environment and sustaniability of our communities and a possible picture of the water utility of the future UTOF.

Bullitt Center Accepts Living Building Challenge 2.0

Some of you may know of the Living Building Challenge it seeks to leverage existing technologies in a way which combine to make a building completely self-sufficient water and energy centers and at the same time increase livability in it's adjacent area. While the Challenge is a rating system for buildings, it is much more. Embarking on a Living Building Challenge is also becoming an active advocate for the process and how it changes the environment around the building.

The first Commercial building to begin to achieve this audacious challenge is the Bullitt Center, home of the International Living Future Institute, creator of the Living Building Challenge. So they are not only encouraging others, but demonstrating that their challenge is attainable and viable in a commercial setting.

Unlike other rating systems for a building to be granted and maintain their status as a Living Building Challenge building they must demonstrate with measurable and verifiable results that they do perform as they are designed to. These are exciting projects for those of us who contend that buildings do not have to be "appliances" plugged into infrastructure as consumers, but could and should be at least neutral to the supporting infrastructure for power and water and hopefully positive contributors for power and treated water. Truly, a community of buildings meeting the Living Building Challenge, could survive and sustain livability without huge central water treatment and power generation systems or even large surface storm water management systems. Buildings and their attendant support systems would be cross linked together to create local eco-systems of the Built Environment which were neutral to the surrounding environment or even positive in terms of water management and air quality.

Take some time looking at the Living Building Challenge website and the resources below and I think you will begin to see some of the possibilities for our future.

Wikipedia Article on Bullitt Center
Seattle’s Bullitt Center: Ready To Debut As World’s Greenest Office Building

Ashoka Fellow Jason McLennan on the Future of Green Building [video]

This article is one of a continuing series about the Built Environment and the sustainable design results which can be achieved when integrated design delivers buildings which are self sufficient in the energy and water they need to operate. It is a connection of strings of interest and links of connection which lead to a greater understanding and the possibilities  available to us today. NoSilos.com

Texas Revises Legislation to allow more CoGeneration - Designers Awaken

If you don't know much about the power system in Texas they are about the only state in the 48 which has their own power grid isolated from their neighbors and it's been more blessing than curse to them. They don't worry about neighboring regional power glitches creating problems for them. Their energy policy is obviously driven by the oil and gas reserves they have which generates nearly all the power in Texas. But the folks in Texas aren't blind to the issues petrol-powered energy has and has a pretty aggressive policy to see a diversified energy production profile for the state.

Recently the legislators did something pretty bold for them, they lessened regulation on CoGeneration facilities. You see the Utility Commission has previously looked at these facilities as small utilities and as such it hampered the development of significant CoGen power where it could really help the grids in TX.

The Texas Legislature recently passed House Bill 2049, which removes regulatory barriers and improves the business climate for cogeneration facilities by clarifying language in the Texas Utility Code. "…this policy change will help the entire Texas grid by relieving grid congestion, increasing grid capacity and reducing the amount of water used in the generation of electricity," said Paul Cauduro, executive director of the Texas Combined Heat and Power Initiative.

See an article on this new legislation here from Fierce Energy

So how does this tie into the issues surrounding the Built Environment and my interests expressed here? Well it's pretty simple. While PV power is nice, it is designed as an add-on system to normal operations and is by it's nature diurnal. CoGen isn't. GoGen systems are designed to recover waste energy and increase overall efficiency by using that waste heat to create more power. Too many times we don't look at our buildings in terms of their waste energy profile. How much energy are our buildings throwing away with single-pass heating and cooling and even the recapture of excess heat in the summer being exhaled from our buildings by cooling systems.

The important thing to realize here these systems have been around a long, long time and even today there are emerging technologies which can absorb more and more excess energy to be either stored and used later or recovered and used immediately to generate power. We do have the technology now, we can use commercially available systems which are designed from residential scale to large industrial complexes. The problem is we are so in love with the PV solar story we have likely forgot some basics of systems design along the way.

My challenge to building design and execution teams is get educated about CoGeneration and it's advantages and educate your client base to it's advantages and quick paybacks and long-term benefits. Our neighbors in Texas have decided CoGen makes sense for their power needs, maybe the rest of us should start looking at CoGen harder and push for easier regulation and implementation in our own back yards.

Infrastructure and AEC Possibilities "Fix It First"

President Obama announced in his State of the Union Address we should be focusing on fixing the broken infrastructure elements in our country. Not long after President Obama's address the civil engineers announced our county only earned a D+ in infrastructure condition and performance. While a lot of focus has been on the roads and bridges our water systems are in deplorable condition. Many cities have pipes which leak almost 20% of their input back into the ground at a tremendous cost to rate payers. Electrical grids and telecommunication networks are aging and in rural communities are often among the oldest installations left in our country.

Roads: Why Fix Them When You Can Build More?

Democrats would rather build more than fix much of anything. Building new cost x times more than to fix what is already there. 

 

Obama Details ‘Fix it First’ Plan

Cutting red tape, increasing private investment, and designating $40 billion for urgent repairs are the three cornerstones of President Obama's new plan for U.S. infrastructure.

Fleshing out the "Fix it First" plan announced Feb. 12 in the State of the Union Address, the White House issued a Fact Sheet on Wednesday (Feb. 20) with more details of the proposal.

"Investing in infrastructure not only makes our roads, bridges, and ports safer and allows our businesses and workers to be as competitive as they need to be in the global economy; it also creates thousands of good American jobs that cannot be outsourced," according to "The President’s Plan to Make America a Magnet for Jobs by Investing in Infrastructure."

Here's Barack Obama's Plan To Fix America's Crumbling Roads And Bridges

... What remains unclear, however, is how the Obama administration plans to pay for this and other infrastructure initiatives that the President outlined in his State of the Union speech last month.

In a speech to the National Governors Association Monday, the President fleshed out additional details of the plan, announcing that his administration will create "regional teams" that will assist states in implementing infrastructure projects.

Fact Sheet: The President’s Plan to Make America a Magnet for Jobs by Investing in Infrastructure

White House fact sheet on infrastructure projects. 

===

Finally, what appears to be a 'shot in the arm' for the basic needs for the country is only a temporary fix to a systemic problem. Costs of federal procurement is higher than any other roadway and infrastructure project type of its kind. Lower real value is produced per dollar spent than in any other kind of construction. While welcome to the larger infrastructure design and construction firms, smaller firms will have to scratch it out to gather their part of the pie. And when the pittance of 40 Billion is spent when we are really talking about over 1 Trillion in needs, the short-term fix will leave us with significant needs to deal with.

Call and write your federal legislators in both the House and Senate to use this as a starting shot in the arm for real wage growth in the country. While you are at it introduce them to the idea of integrated design and delivery to help each dollar go further. 

Top Five Most Read Articles at this blog.

 Seems people over the past year were really interested in the lean topics but just as interesting three of the most popular articles came from pretty early on and all three were tied to BIM in some way. But one of my favorites about the Design Age is still there in the top five.

Feel free to chime in about your favorite. Oh, and if there's something you would like to hear about more let me know that too. 

And thanks to everyone for your readership and support. 

Andrew

Remember, "Collaboration is the glue of success."

Rigidity in Institutions is harbinger of failure

My good friend James L. Salmon has a blog called Collaborative Construction I know some of you read, but for those of you who don't check out this link to his post entitled (SMART)X Public Policy? While the article James refers to is interesting and on point to the medical profession, it is also a shade of foreboding in the Built Environment as well. As more and more public policy is enacted in the areas of building performance, emissions from the built environment, water purity, water usage and the like, we continually restrict the creativity of human minds and calcify the momentum we need to maintain to make the huge changes needed to create environments which are both environmentally and economically sustainable.

While legislation to improve air quality has seen some success, there is also abuse on both sides and this results in further draconian reaction from regulators, legislators and litigators. Like Professor Mead, the author of the cited post, points out, we need to refocus our efforts on getting the bloat out of policy and legislation and focus on more responsive means. The AEC industry needs to take note, we are already heavily regulated in the areas of building design performance, labor, material safety and job safety. The business does not need to bear more regulation for the sake of trying to be more responsive to the needs of society.

As an industry, we need to be more productive, innovative and responsive and supportive business relationships with a goal in mind to shed our old thinking for new relationships and better performance negating the need for more legislation and administrative oversight. Responsible change is less expensive for everyone concerned.





This is s continuing series of ideas based on Connections and Links which form Strings of knowledge related to the Built Environment and the issues surrounding project delivery and regulatory compliance. 

Collaborative Construction Sponsors (SMART)x Game Changers in 2013

Our sister blog site hosted and written by James L. Salmon is upping the ante again. The efforts from our work at Strings, Connections and Links as well as the new site www.NoSilos.com are working together to support James' launch of the (SMART)x Game Changer series in 2013. This is going to be an interesting series of presentations and engaging conversations about how you can be involved in promoting permanent change in your organization, the projects you deliver and the evolution of services provided by the AEC industry.

Chaos and Change are Brothers - Part 2

Recently a group of really bright folks, Dawn Naney, Clay Goser and Marcelo Azambuja posted a new document entitled "Accellerating the Adoption of Lean Thinking in the Construction Industry" which deals with the issue of adopting lean management theory within the construction industry. The following is part of the response I posted on the LinkedIn discussion group which Dawn posted. I thought after I wrote the response that it is just what I've been thinking about writing as Part 2 of this series, so here goes. I hope you enjoy the read. Of course you know Collaboration is the Glue for Success. If you haven't read Part 1 of this series then here's the link.

I would agree with the findings of the authors, but I contend there are a few of us in the business who have been talking about how to make the change stick and at the same time doing something about it. Up to this point we have been pretty quiet about it. (Yes gentle reader, I'll have much more to say here in this blog over the coming weeks.) The root issue revealed in the adoption curve that Gartner espouses, is the lack of efficient change management. When we stop

Google Glass, Augmented Reality and Always-On

I just came across a follow on blog post by Josh Web who is one of those guys looking at what is going on and extending it to what might go on in the future. Some of you know I've been interested in the melding of visual and data driven technologies to provide a richer environment to work and live within. I first started thinking about this back in the late 1990's when I ran across a couple of guys in Dallas who were trying to get some augmented reality off the ground for HVAC field techs. They were really ahead of their time. Cell networks were just getting past the old analog services and Dallas has always been one of those testing markets for new doo-dads and services.

So, I've been wondering when we can get BIM, geocoding and virtual reality to work together and what that might mean to the AEC and Built Environment worlds. Wifi enabled cell phones can get down to pretty small increments for locational accuracy when four transceiver locations can pinpoint the WiFi device inside of 2 feet or less. How about using this kind of technology for mining, roadway construction, bridge construction, pipeline alignment and construction. All these types of projects would benefit from some form or combination of augmented reality merged with design and fabrication virtual models. The folks at Trimble Navigation already are embarked on the remote control of roadway construction machinery and open pit mining, but there is a lot more to be done.

Take a quick look at the slide presentation by Josh below and then let me know what you think about where we might be going with these idea in a couple of years.
Enjoy!

The Top Five Questions to Assure Survival in the AEC Business

Phil Bernstein, FAIA of Autodesk has an interesting article posted today on the Architecture daily news feed. http://goo.gl/yML4A.

Phil, gives you five questions to ask yourself. Strangely enough, these are almost the same five questions I've been challenging firms to ask themselves for the past 10 years. Phil, thanks for giving them the press time they deserve.

The Top Five Questions to Assure Survival in the AEC business
1. Where are you going to be in five years?

Metal Buildings and Net-Zero Performance, Are You Kidding?

The Friday Special Edition..
Metal Construction News and Net-Zero buildings? I mean metal building and net-zero design, who would have thought. But check this article out "10 Things to Know about Net-Zero." Mark Robins, Senior Editor of Metal Construction News writes about an unlikely topic, how metal buildings can achieve net-zero status. To his credit Mr. Robbins addresses the issues of air leakage and thermal performance as two of the largest issues

Penn State BIM Execution Plan Review

I have to apologize to you, one of my loyal readers for taking so long to get back to the review of the Penn State BIM Execution Plans v 2.0. I'll get to the FM Planning Guide in a couple of weeks.

If you used this product before, you will find just about everything just as you left it, but there are better controls for what goes in and how you manage the elements. If this is new to you, then spend 30 minutes with the documentation and you will find a real gem. I still don't really like the use of a spreadsheet to deliver the working content, but it is easy and approachable for everyone. Most people will find it easy to use and modify if you have just a bit more than the basics in modifying and creating spreadsheets.

I would love to see this as a data-driven java or php app that could be implemented on a Unix LAMP or MSIE web server instead of the spreadsheets. There isn't very much in the sheets that makes a spreadsheet handy other than the all-pervasive tabular format of the process. Being tabular in presentation reduces it to a hierarchical data format which a MySQL data schema would handle very well. Modifying the elements would only be changing the variables and pseudo table headings and names, the linkages would likely stay all the same. If delivered in this format, then we would have a true collaborative environment where more than one person could reliably work on the project information anytime and from anywhere they were given permission. For one of you inventive and courageous programmers out there here's a ready-made project for you.

I really like the initial project information, documentation of goals, rating of the ability of the team members to perform tasks and the associated risks. It does make for the ability to make rational decisions about who will be making decisions about what and who will need help to get through the project without creating undue hazard to the rest of the team.

Communications between the teams, naming conventions for files, components, levels/layers, workgroups, even libraries of components can be defined here so everyone knows where and what can be used. I like the ability to give web addresses or file locations for these elements. If there is a wiki used to hold much of this information, then the url's to the correct pages and tags can be documented here.

Since it is delivered now as a spreadsheet, you can use as much or little of the framework which suits your project. If you have other sources for execution plans such as the one from Indiana, Texas or the Feds, then you can add those as additional sheets or rows within the framework as is needed.

In all, the authors have done a great job of creating a thorough and flexible framework for anyone just getting started or an old hand at BIM authoring a leg-up to better manage an increasingly complex job which has grown to be a central document contributing to the success of any integrated or collaborative BIM project.

In the thumb's up rating scale of 5 I'll have to give it a 5 for thoroughness and content and a 3 on delivery because it doesn't go far enough in my opinion to encourage collaborative participation.

BIM Metrics

The following is an email I wrote to a LinkdIn contact Tim Cole of Causeway Software. Tim had asked me about what I thought about how the Levels of Detail effect the kind of data which can be collected as Key Performance Metrics around BIM models. This is my second reply in the discussion between Tim and I and I thought others might be interested in this particular segment. The issue I'm dealing with is at the the heart of metrics in any form, and that's the data collected and for what purpose that data is intended. My contention that the kind of data some folks want to collect is a direct reflection on the authoring software and purpose of the project's original intention. So here goes. I hope you enjoy the read. And as always remember, "Collaboration is the Glue of Success."

Tim,
I'm not sure how I came up with the five levels, but they are similar to the US AIA level of detail document. I've modified that level to suit what my experience has taught me and what I've seen more advanced Owners such as General Motors, Ford, Motorolla and Intel use as their increasing tiers of service they ask for. For man of us in the US the first level of use is just assumed to be a 3d model. I know you can have a flat drawing that has data attributes on it, but it really is not a virtual building model, it is just a flat drawing with data attributes. Yes I do know you can do 3d Acad with 3d blocks and attributes, and that could be constructed as a BIM model, but it is pretty crude and rudimentary. Acad never was intended to hold a lot of data attributes, it is a drafting program. Using it in the extended form is a bit cumbersome. Then there's Catia. A premiere 3d mechanical modeling tool Frank Gehry has spent millions on to make it into a building modeling tool. And a very good one, but at a tremendous cost to own and operate.

Then we get to the built for purpose software like Revit, Archicad, Tekla and Datacad. These tools were built to handle data and intended to model space and construction from the beginning. Revit's history comes out of a mechanical modeling history but the guys quickly found that a mechanical parametric modeler just didn't work well to construct buildings, so they started all over and used a completely different mathematical base for the definition of parts. There is only one other program I know of designed like Revit since the 1980's and Tekla owns that original source code now. Tekla and Revit share some common ancestry in the algorithms they use to define elements but Revit has taken that definition and internalized the data store to be almost entirely inside the model. That, I think, is the one weakness of Revit, but eventually they will change this and make most of the data external and accessible to 3rd parties as the projects grow in size and complexity.

The takeaway here is that purpose-built software intends to create a virtual building from the outset and not be a drafting or documentation tool. That is the biggest difference in the two camps or classes of software on the market today. Here in the US most of the users don't think of any 2d documents as BIM. Maybe intelligent drawings, but certainly not a virtual building. So for us starting at Level 1 as a 3d virtual building, although it may be just a very general idea of the design and construction, or maybe no construction technology has been thought of at all. It really just conveys a design intent and not much more. You know that these models are quick and dirty and there are a lot of 3d modeling tools that can be used to get this kind of result, but it's not a BIM model if there isn't any Information component in it to help w/ completing the design. This stage is where Onuma really works well. Their space and utilization tools are really nice for building models at this level. They allow you to use something like Sketchup and then marry that spatial model to data by importing the 3d into Onuma and apply lots of data attributes to the spatial construction. There is a lot of value there to FM and Capital planning folks that don't really care about the construction detail.

The work I've been doing for the last 10 years has been focused on how to leverage the incredible resources of a virtual building process into the overall delivery methods we use. I've found that no matter what level of detail you use in a model there is a much more important story going on along side it which we leave completely out of the picture and that gap creates a lot of confusion and cost. Marrying those conversations with the model in a central storage repository so anyone connected to the project can understand why decisions were made would be a tremendous leap forward. There are so many levels where this 'conversation dialog map' could answer all kinds of questions about what is going on. Paired with a knowledge store of allied information keyed as a semantic network of relationships is what I think is needed to help BIM deliver the meta information which is really where the real value is during the building's lifetime. This goes way beyond the concept of levels of design and gets back more closely to the original questions about BIM metrics.

With a data store as described above you would know about how decisions were made, what the design assumptions and goals were, how they were intended to me met and how they were actually met in the end product. These are the metrics which are most important to Owners, not what level of detail we used in a model. The results of thoughts which turned into action, this is what building owners and investors are interested in. What was the return on investment for a design implemented over time? Did the extra money spent, really result in better service and a longer material service life?  Right now we aren't measuring this kind of performance. In fact, we aren't even actively determining if USGBC certified and rated buildings really perform over time as they were intended. There are some pilot projects going on, but a limited response for now. So do Owners really get any benefit out of a 'green' building? That to me is an important metric which few people are doing any significant work on now.

In the end, all metrics are driven by data. Data that can be reliably gathered and analyzed in a standard format (read an extension of accounting rules). Until the profession matures enough to settle on some data-driven processes, this question of metrics will be one of many words, conferences and papers and a few people who bravely go out and try something, anything to see what works. Those brave few will be the ones that set the pace for the rest of the professions years afterwards.

Andrew Abernathy

 This post is a continuing String of  articles as on the effects of Building Information Modeling and Virtual Design Construction on the Built Environment. As such there are Connections between the worlds of  design, software, economics, finance and Facilities Management.

BIM Without Collaboration Doesn't Measure Up

A couple of weeks ago Ted Garrison of New Construction Strategies interviewed me on one of my favorite topics, collaboration in context of the use of Building Information Modeling. Here's the quick synopsis Ted used when he posted the interview. Just click on the link below to listen. 

“BIM isn’t about drawing lines, it’s about building buildings virtually;” declares Andrew Abernathy. As a principle in Collaboration Consultant, Abernathy provides expertise on project management collaboration. Listen to him explain how BIM can improve your projects.

Listen Now

This  post is a part of a String of posts part of a conversation about design and virtual design and construction and BIM

Energy, Water and Food: Three legs of Civilizations' Stool

I just finished reading an interview which first appeared in the 4/23/12 issue of Forbes magazine that Rich Karlgaard, a Forbes staff member had with Shell Oil's Peter Voser. Mr. Voser is the new CEO of the UK owned oil giant headquartered in the Netherlands. He is the first CEO not of UK or Dutch citizenship and the first non-technical CEO for the company, he's an economist of all things. While you might not think of Shell as an environmental friendly company, one thing remains true, our world runs on petrochemicals and will for quite a long time. Mr. Vosser points out that until only very recently biofuels reached the 1% of consumption/production point and solar is very close behind biofuels. And that's after decades of pushing both of these alternative energy sources. So the chances of displacing oil in 10 years as a dominate player is pretty slim and likely none. Why is this important? Why do we preach diversity in energy production and high efficiency for buildings? 

Design Age - Part 4

After this installment I'm likely going to take a rest on the issues of complex design. If this is the first time you found the string, please go back and read the Introduction in Part 1 and the following installments in Part 2 and Part 3. They will give you the background needed to really understand the full impact of this most recent Part 4.

The Dilemma of the Crowd

or most problem solvers there is a paradigm we have been following for as long as we can remember. It's the trail of the lone discoverer. The 'me against nature, the world and all the other idiots who couldn't be bothered to figure this issue out' complex. But there is this strange phenomenon happening more and more often. The longer I spend time on this problem, the more and more angles and alleys it reveals. What I thought was going to be a simple solution to a problem I thought was clear, the more cloudy and tantelizingly obscure the issue becomes. I begin to talk to some close friends and colleagues about parts of the problem, not wanting to reveal everything at once, to get their take on the issue. Over time I reveal more and more of my discoveries and pretty soon, without my really understanding what is happening, I find they are talking about the same issue with their friends and I find out about this by accident. Now the idea is presented to me in a way I hadn't even considered and by asking a few question, I find out it's like the party game 'telephone.'
What I hear from this other person is only vaguely like my original idea, but it has some interestingly new twist of understanding I hadn't considered.

Design Age - Part 3

In this installment of the series on the Design Age I'm going to describe further the Traditional and Emerging problem solving methods. The previous parts one and two I dealt with the definition of the issue surrounding the new Design Age and the issues of solution complexity and scarcity of resources to deal with these seemingly insurmountable problems. These are truly the "wicked" problems of our day.

For some of you reading this have probably thought 'why deal with this issue at all?' Just look around at any of the forum posts on any of the general design centered or AEC centered forums and you will see a host of questions clustered around several large topics such as Integrated Product Design or Building Information Modeling (BIM) and how to use this new class of software and process as it applies to design, construction and building maintenance. How does the supply chain become involved and a host of other issues? These questions have been bandied back and forth for over five or six years and no single answer seems to solve the issue. No single tool or process seems to completely define a singular solution. How can it when the problem is so large and has so many variables to work with?

This is not to say any one of the current partial solutions available as a process, methodology or software tool is wrong or is not effective, it is rather an issue of series of partial solutions as suggestions or viewpoints as to a method to address only a portion of the larger problem. For this reason, such a singularly large and complex problem cannot be solved by a singular problem solver. We hope and dream for such a solution, but the chances of it happening are just too small when we look at the interrelated variables connected to the problem.

Traditional Solvers, Those of the Scientific Method Persuasion
So let's look further on the basis of the two problem solving methods we have available to us today. One is the traditional singular subject matter expert using the scientific method. A master of the problem domain, with significant experience and practical knowledge across a wide area of issues. Even to the point of being a da vinci.

• Existing and well known paradigm is comfortable.
• Works well for technologically and data-driven solutions and methods

Best used when you have

• Controlled environment
• Controlled Scope
• Singularly understood goal
• Single language and meaning

A single person acts as the originator and choke-point for all solutions. This is the model of the lone designer, scientist in the lab and painter in the lonely room. Now don't get me wrong. For centuries this method has worked well for many of the problems we used it on. The Scientific Method has led us to some remarkable discoveries and bettered the lives of billions of people over the world. But this method intentionally limits the problem viewpoint to a controllable set of variables. Results are often partial and the best research scientists often admit in their findings that their results are only partial and at best, are only indications of a possible event or finding due to this artificial limiting of variables. When I see these disclaimers in research work I often think maybe their work needed a bit broader view and more input from other, often unlikely sources would have served them well. But this kind of scholarly work leaves no such opportunities if the traditional scientific method is to be followed.

Non-Traditional Solvers, Those of the 'Wicked' Persuasion
Enter the complex or "wicked"problem, where the  problem demands a network of designers and subject matter experts, often from a multitude of information domains. When a problem is posed to a group such as this, many times the supposed issue is only a symptom of a deeper issue not even realized in the original problem statement. Now there is an issue of redefining the problem through the lenses of the various information domains and the melding of multiple languages into a singular understanding. Often a new language idiom is defined so all the members can clearly communicate. Even the social dynamic of new alliances across differing information domains complicates the discussion of issues and possible solutions. This really gets messy for a while until some form of equilibrium is reached.

A whole new set of methods and techniques and skill sets are needed in this context. The soft 'people skills' now become as important, no more important than the technical knowledge and experience of each participant. For, if the group cannot put aside at least most of their egocentric universes nothing will be produced. A collective consensus is the goal here, not a democratic majority. Acceptance of the possibility of a predetermined outcome by consent, many times by only a plurality is the direction of the collective solution. Just as with the Scientific Method, there will be unintended consequences since not all variables surrounding the problem are accounted for. But this time there is an acceptance that those unknowns exist and will create some unknown result. And the realization that this is not the only answer possible, it is just an answer out of the millions or billions of possible answers, all with a different set of outcomes, some anticipated and others unanticipated.

It is a mess, but it is an informed mess. A mess of decisions made in light of the best information known at the time by a group of invested stakeholders. Stakeholders that are seeking the best answer they can find, given the filtering lenses of their experiences, information and resulting consensus. Horst Rittel said that this is almost an insane act to involve yourself in this process knowing there is no definitive solution and out of the infinite possible solutions your collective will pick one and it might not, in fact most likely will not, produce the result you intended.

Social planners, urban designers, transportation planners, even physicians and physicists all live with this set of paradoxical positions. Yet, if we are to move forward, some brave souls have to dive in, inform themselves, look at a problem from every possible viewpoint and then make a decision as to what they will do. Hoping that some of that what they anticipate to happen does happen, even new events which reveal new possibilities for better solutions.

The Meshing of A Mess
In the built environment domain and the narrow AEC/OOFM world, we have a seemingly unending set of variables from the domains of finance, physics, economics, spatial aesthetic, material sciences, biology, chemistry and even the human impact to name only a few, to consider. How do these mesh together? How to we find the important points of most impact and positive change? How do we resolve the questions of what values we hold most dear? Where do we find the most value? Even what is expressed as value when the constraints we have held in the past as defining boundaries are being wiped away on a daily basis?

These are the questions as professionals in this business we are called upon to answer. Up to this point I think the indictments against us as being the most inefficient and wasteful are the least of our worries. the damage we have done over the past five decades is largely from our own indecision, infighting and inaction. This has to change soon.

We know we are the largest contributors of waste in our economy and environment. We have demonstrated to be the most resistive to change of any other economic sector. To our credit we have recently begun to awake to these challenges. We don't have 10 or 20 years to solve these difficult issues. We need to be willing to open our eyes to new approaches to problem solving and beg, borrow and steal every possible tool at our disposal and combine those assets into a new solution engine that has not been seen before. I say put aside all our past preconceptions of how or why we did something and start with a clean slate and build a new way of improving our Built Environment. Why? Because we have some of the most difficult and yet impactfull problems to solve. The benefits are enormous while the risks are just as large. Not to act will only continue the same devastating results of the past.

So look beyond your traditional sphere of influence and business. Look to see what others are doing to make themselves more efficient and steal from them. Remake the idea to fit your needs and then do it all over again in ever broadening circles. The power of doubling will take effect and soon the influence of your original action will be the basis of a whole new wave of innovation and change, creating benefit for both the producer and the consumer in ways you never thought or intended.

On to Part 4, the last part for now.