Project Description

From an early stage, we felt that the standards and practices of our office needed an intervention, to transform the way we utilize the valuable project data we have at our disposal. Industry leaders agree that a change is needed, “…the opportunity is now to bring the right management and corrective measures together with economic resilience,” says Kelly Farrell, CEO of CallisonRTKL. With over 1,000 professionals in 21 locations around the world, and a history that stretches back over 70 years, CRTKL is very well equipped both in experience and infrastructure to tackle such a challenge. We are proposing to move away from the traditional linear-design strategies of yesterday. Our plan would establish a workflow where information distribution can flow more freely, allowing for data-driven design-development at earlier phases of a project’s life cycle.

Our aim is to develop, what we call an “Ecosystem of Tools,” that operate across multiple design phases to create buildings that function as “operating systems,” providing data and feedback, and informing future design iterations. This tool ecosystem would have the ability to pull data from a variety of different sources, like GIS databases both external and inhouse. This data would then be sent to a cloud database, like SpeckleWorks, where it could be easily accessed by members of a project team. Teams could then feed these collections of data directly into any one of the tools within CRTKL’s larger tool ecosystem and the tools would automatically execute their operations and return quantitative and qualitative information back. The result would be a large array of simple, and user-friendly tools that could analyze aspects of a project at any phase of production and provide valuable data driven feedback to the user.

The tools we created for our demo focused primarily on improving the pre-design phase of a project. This is often a very short phase, but one that is crucial in determining if and how a client will move forward with a proposal. A design teams ability to rapidly study, and iterate, design concepts in this phase of the project life cycle, can be the difference between a project moving forward, or being shut down before it ever has the chance to take off. Our tool ecosystem would greatly improve a user’s ability to create several unique design-options and receive data driven feedback about the benefits and drawbacks of each in real time. The goal of our “Tool Ecosystem” is to take advantage of software, like Grasshopper, Speckleworks, and Human UI, to evaluate information effortlessly and communicate this information with our clients. By adding this simple input information into an online ecosystem, it can then be accessed by all other analysis tools within our larger tool library and deliver feedback seamlessly. For example, if a user wants to know more about relationships between the site, and each of the massing studies, all they would need to do is open the “Site Analysis Tool.” Once opened, it would pull the relevant information that has already been collected in our cloud database, and automatically execute a series of data analysis operations. This data will then be displayed both graphically, and diagrammatically, for the user. Looking at these pre-design development tools, we can see how these analyses can update in real time, as option studies are cycled through, and as parameters are changed. These pre-design tools can also be used to analyze environmental systems, using software like DIVA. Architects are always interested in the solar performance of a building, but because of the complicated calculations required, these kinds of analyses are often not studied until the schematic design, or even design development stage of a project. Using our tools to input location and time variables, users will be able to set accurate solar locations and extract shadow study data at a much earlier stage in the project life cycle. Using these environmental tools allow users to create a mapping of daylight radiation. Using information taken from our cloud database, the tool will automatically run a simulation which generates a radiation diagram. This information can give designers a much earlier idea of what solar radiation exposure might look like around the façade.

The nature of this tool ecosystem, is that as our understanding of the data we have at our disposal increases, as our familiarity with a new and innovative workflow improves, and as our office becomes increasingly familiar with the software these tools use to operate, our ecosystem will grow in size and in scope. The individual tools we demoed during our short four-day workshop are not a completed picture of a fully realized tool library, but rather a proof of concept of how easily our office could begin to roll out tools like these and start to establish such an ecosystem. As we see it, there are tools that operate at different scales, building vs. urban, and within those scales are subcategories of analysis that we could examine. At building scale, there is building information, and there is environment information. Building information tools would be comprised of tools that looked at things like site area calculations, program breakdowns, and parking ratio calculations, while environment information would represent a collection of tools that would examine things like solar heat gain, acoustic conditions, and wind load calculations. Similarly, tools at the urban scale can be broken down into more specific tools that examine macro scale conditions that would have potential impacts on a buildings overall design. For a larger list of Key Performance Improvements that could be made to increase the overall effectiveness of our tool ecosystem, see our “KPI List” XL sheet, that details a much larger and more comprehensive list of potential tools to be adapted into our ecosystem.

Were we given another week to continue to study and develop our tool ecosystem, and our new dynamic data-driven workflow, there are many areas where additional work could be invaluable. We would like to focus more specifically on how GIS data could be collected from external sources and seamlessly integrated into an internal CallisonRTKL database that could be more easily accessed by members of our office. We feel that one of the largest barriers to entry for the creation of these kind of workflows is establishing a single repository for the data that is regularly accesses to be stored. These kind of tool libraries are often created and quickly fall out of use because the data needed to use them is often disorganized and scattered across several different databases. Creating an easy to understand in house data collection and distribution service could make our tool much more effective, and make our firm much more desirable to clients who are interested in hiring a company that can collect their building’s data, parse it, and give it back to them as usable information.

Each of the tools demonstrated by our demo, represent elements within a large tool ecosystem. Establishing a user-friendly tool set like this will allow design teams to more effectively generate data driven design iterations earlier in the project life cycle. By requiring minimal information inputs, and utilizing cloud-based data collection systems, we can allow teams to create visualized information effortlessly, and give clients qualitative and quantitative feedback more effectively. In conclusion, our tool ecosystem, and reimagined workflow could help to reshape our office, rethink its design practices, improve it procurement and distribution of data and infuse technology and innovation more seamlessly into our daily operations.