30 |BUILDING DESIGN+CONSTRUCTION | October 2019same municipalities could use the data to jus-
tify the expense of projects to taxpayers.
AEC fi rms must also demonstrate the value
of data to get clients to pay for it, says Herbert
Els, Senior Vice President–Building Technology
Systems with WSP USA in Boulder, Colo. That
value is still sometimes a harder sell because
of data’s “soft ROI,” says Envise’s Baldwin,who observes that data, at the moment, seems
more relevant to developers and property
managers of existing buildings than for new
construction, “where we need to be.”SEPARATING WHEAT FROM CHAFF
Faced with a fi rehose of data from myriad
sources at their disposal, AEC fi rms and their
clients have become far more discerning about
what they collect, use, and disseminate. Firms
say they’re trying to avoid falling down a “rab-
bit hole” that either buries them in informa-
tion overload or sends them off on wild goose
chases. A good anchoring point, says Arup’s
Kostura and Gensler’s Tyson, is to identify theproblem fi rst before thinking about how
data might help to solve it.
There are three types of data relevant
to construction, says Don Weinreich,
FAIA, LEED AP, Management Partner
with Ennead Architects: Static (such as
a building’s dimensions), Active (such
as tracking the performance of me-
chanical systems to measure effi ciency),
and Human-centric, which Weinreich is
convinced is the industry’s new frontier:
“We now have the ability to know where
people are in a space, and to predict
where they’ll be. This opens our under-
standing of how spaces are being used
and how systems are deployed.”
The most important data for Clark
Construction, says its Vice President
Brian Krause, revolves around a proj-
ect’s existing conditions, its costs, and the pro-
ductivity of buildings. His fi rm’s goal is to marry
this data “with our building expertise to provide
actionable insights.” In that light, jobsite super-
intendents remain integral to the data collection
and analysis processes. “We need them so we
can write algorithms and for their fi eld pres-
ence,” says Krause.WSP is focused on analyzing building systems
against each other to gauge performance, says
Els. The fi rm has also installed IoT devices in
its Boulder offi ce, turning it into a “living lab”
that, says Els, infl uences future design.
McCownGordon Construction in Kansas City,
Mo., has been leveraging cloud-based platforms
to collect data, and supplementing APIs with
what Dustin Burns, the fi rm’s IT Director, calls
“robotic process automation,” software that
extracts information to generate reports in the
form of Excel fi les to which new information can
be merged.
“The practical application of data is in
spotting leading indicators that could lead to‘We now have the ability to know where people are in a space, and to predict
where they’ll be. This opens our understanding of how spaces are being used
and how systems are deployed.’ — DON WEINREICH, FAIA, LEED AP, ENNEAD ARCHITECTS
Arup has been developing an AI framework for its Mass Motion program that uses computer
vision to gain insight into the way people move through spaces.ARUPAEC TECH^ |
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