Data-Driven Design and Construction

25 Strategies for Capturing, Analyzing and Applying Building Data

Randy Deutsch

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781118898703
• eBook ISBN: 9781118899212
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Professional Practice in Architecture

"In this comprehensive book, Professor Randy Deutsch has unlocked and laid bare the twenty-first century codice nascosto of architecture. It is data. Big data. Data as driver...This book offers us the chance to become informed and knowledgeable pursuers of data and the opportunities it offers to making architecture a wonderful, useful, and smart art form."

—From the Foreword by James Timberlake, FAIA

Written for architects, engineers, contractors, owners, and educators, and based on today's technology and practices, Data-Driven Design and Construction: 25 Strategies for Capturing, Applying and Analyzing Building Data

• addresses how innovative individuals and firms are using data to remain competitive while advancing their practices.
• seeks to address and rectify a gap in our learning, by explaining to architects, engineers, contractors and owners—and students of these fields—how to acquire and use data to make more informed decisions.
• documents how data-driven design is the new frontier of the convergence between BIM and architectural computational analyses and associated tools.
• is a book of adaptable strategies you and your organization can apply today to make the most of the data you have at your fingertips.

Data-Driven Design and Construction was written to help design practitioners and their project teams make better use of BIM, and leverage data throughout the building lifecycle.

part I
Why Data, Why Now?

We are in a race now to produce better and better information, instead of better and better buildings.

—Paul Fletcher

Data-Informed Decision-Making

Design and construction professionals often find themselves in situations where they are asked to defend their decisions—their choices, preferences, designs, or actions. The way professionals go about justifying their decisions is central to the shaping of their work and determining what gets built.

Throughout history, it has been the architect’s role to make the arbitrary believable and rational. How do architects currently go about justifying their actions? What results are they finding? How successful are their efforts? It’s not that there is more arbitrariness in architecture today, but that design professionals are having a harder time convincing others of their authority and the soundness of their selections. In school, design-professionals-in-the-making are trained to justify not their choices, but rather themselves.

What design and construction professionals really mean when they use the words justify or justification is often other terms and concepts used in handling the defense of design decisions: rationalization, self-justification, explanation, description, and excuse-making. These all add up to after-the-fact rationalization of design decisions.

There is a need for design and construction professionals, starting in school, to abandon self-justifying behavior. What we want to do is back our decisions up with data. Get the data on it. For some, data is something that is addressed after the fact: a rationalization of or support for actions already taken. These post-facto rationalizations are detected by everyone, seen as such, and therefore less effective in justifying and more importantly, convincing.

Owners are looking for reasons, not rationalizations. Can convincing grounds for decisions be found? Have design professionals been looking in the wrong places to ground their decisions? Is there an a priori ranking of the types of justifications that can take precedence? In other words, are there ultimate justifications, or only those that are most effective in a given situation?

chapter 1
The Data Turn

Model quality is certainly improving, but we are still not seeing enough valuable embedded data.

—David W. Light

Until recently, the discussion of data wasn’t a daily occurrence in most architecture, engineering, and construction companies. Why then is there a need today for an understanding of how data is being leveraged in architecture, engineering, and construction, and by owners and operators? In other words: specifically for the AECO industry, why is this happening now?

Five Factors Leading to the Leveraging of Data and Industry Change

What forces and technologies have come together in the second decade of the twenty-first century that make the gathering and use of data possible for industry practitioners in firms small, medium, and large?

Technology

Technology has played a large part in the rise of data availability and use, including increased computer power, enabling the ability to crunch large quantities of data and provide higher-resolution communications, access to the cloud, and less expensive storage options. Software has a role in all of this as well. We have started to ask how building information can be better leveraged using data mining, and have started to investigate new directions for accelerating the flow of building information throughout a facility’s life cycle. In turn, we have started to see where BIM data is being used in decision making in design, construction, and building operations. (See Figures 1.1 and 1.2.)

Figure 1.1 BIM Benchmark measures real-world performance of computer hardware. Users are presented with a series of statistics concerning how quickly their computer executed a series of tasks in a BIM model, allowing them to make more informed hardware-purchasing decisions.

© CASE

Figure 1.2 A version of the BIM Benchmark tool prototyped at CASE.

© CASE

Many design and construction professionals—and also their clients—are justifiably frustrated that promised results from BIM tools are not being more readily achieved. The reason for this delay is that so-called higher uses of BIM—analyses, including scheduling, cost estimating, energy, sustainability, facilities management, and facility operations—require not only collaboration on integrated teams, but also the collection and strategic application of building data. Another factor is higher-resolution communications. Soon people will be able to share vastly more information than they are currently. I asked Andrew Witt, Director of Research at Gehry Technologies, if this can be attributed to an increase in the need to share or something else. “It’s the opportunistic availability of both data and the means to share it,” says Witt. “It’s not necessarily based on some new requirement to share. There’s a greater and greater expectation of higher and higher fidelity communication. People will have the means to execute high-resolution communication. People won’t necessarily be communicating more frequently. But the resolution of that communication will be much higher.”

The higher resolution will enable more data and information—and more exact data and information—to be shared more quickly and more reliably. Part of this is being brought about by cloud computing. Mads Jensen, CEO of Sefaira, admits that he wouldn’t have a product if not for the cloud: “With cloud computing, we can now analyze everything in far greater detail, thereby using the analysis of our design data to actually shape the next design decision.” (See Figures 1.3 and 1.4.)

Figure 1.3 Shading tests and corresponding changes to cooling loads.

© Sefaira

Figure 1.4 Sefaira’s outputs include clear informative graphs that can exported and edited to fit the designer’s brand.

© Sefaira

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Strategy No. 3: Look Outside the Industry

The architecture profession and construction industry have always trailed mainstream technology. CASE’s David Fano suggests one way to keep up or even stay ahead: “If you want to see what’s coming up for the AEC industry, just look at articles in TechCrunch from five years ago. You can see where the world is going. If anything, we’re behind.”

Fano takes a contrarian view, holding everything that appears new today has actually been with us for some time: “How long has business intelligence been around? It’s old news. For the AEC industry, it’s a new, innovative, groundbreaking thing—it’s really not. That’s what I tell people—others have figured this out for us already. The technology’s figured out. The software’s figured out. Processes are mostly figured out. We just have to readapt them to our industry.”

“To us, the cloud is simply a server. There is nothing particularly new about this technology. Architecture firms in the 1970s were using servers for the same reason we use the cloud today: servers can store and process orders of magnitude more data than can be done on a local machine,” adds Fano. “Rather than throwing data away, we can keep it in the cloud. We can create massive databases of every model a firm has produced. Not just the final model; we can save every version of the model’s development.”

“The short answer is that we are really just standing on the shoulders of the phenomenal advances we’ve seen in computer science in the last three decades,” concludes Mads Jensen, CE...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Titlepage
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Measuring the Immeasurable, Validating the Ineffable
• Part I: Why Data, Why Now?
• Part II: Capturing, Analyzing and Applying Building Data
• Part III: What Data Means for You, Your Firm, Profession, and Industry
• Epilogue: The Future of Data in AEC
• Appendix
• Index
• EULA