How Digital Tools Are Driving Sustainable Urban Design

How Digital Tools Are Driving Sustainable Urban Design

NARRATOR: Welcome to the Esri and the Science of Where podcast. Autodesk is the premier software company used by architecture, engineering, and construction firms. Because Autodesk works across these industries, they understand why any big location-based project needs a digital twin. It helps with modeling, simulating, and ultimately building skyscrapers.

Theo Agelopoulos, vice president in charge of design strategy at Autodesk, says it saves a lot of hassle and a lot of money.

THEO AGELOPOULOS: Digital project delivery is about not just managing data, it's about managing people, and connecting the right people and the right processes at the right time. So when you think about a project as it enters from planning into design and construction, you go potentially from having a small number of planners to hundreds of different disciplines coming together over a certain period of time to coordinate work and to manage risk.

NARRATOR: Theo Agelopoulos explains why a digital twin integrated with location technology enables the collaboration essential for a successful build.

HOST: Hi, Theo, and welcome to Esri and the Science of Where podcast.

THEO AGELOPOULOS: Thanks, John, for having me. Excited to be here.

HOST: So Theo, you're the vice president in charge of design strategy at Autodesk. Before we get deep into this conversation, let's start with some definitions. I work for Esri, whose software is grounded in geographic information systems. GIS is a framework for gathering, managing, and analyzing data rooted in the science of geography. Your work at Autodesk is deep in building information modeling, or BIM. How would you describe that for our listeners?

THEO AGELOPOULOS: Maybe I'll go back in the way-back time machine. I think when you look back over the last 40 or 50 years, we've gone through multiple digital transformations in design and construction. Many years ago, we started with 2D design. It was about engineers, contractors, and architects documenting their designs in 2D. It started with paper in 2D, then transitioned to digital 2D, and then with the evolution of 3D models, we moved into this 3D modeling space. The next phase of transformation was building information modeling and building an information management system for delivering better digital design and construction.

The way I would describe BIM today, it's really about a digital delivery process that allows our customers to optimize the way they plan, design, build, and operate digital assets. A good example would be roads and highways as a type of asset. The first thing that happens early on is planning, environmental impact studies, demand, and so forth.

A lot of those decisions and insights are generated through GIS, or survey and mapping information that's generating real-world context. Engineers are then taking that real-world context into a design application and using that to create better designs. And by creating better designs, they're creating more sustainable designs and ultimately better managing risk as they move into construction.

As they go through construction, they're really trying to deliver that road and highway on time, on budget, high quality, safely, with low risk. Once that road and highway is built, of course, the owner needs that information for the lifetime of that road and highway.

Every built asset, whether it's a road, a building, or anything else, has a place on the Earth somewhere. So it has spatial context, and that's why it's so important to connect geospatial data to design and construction data.

HOST: It was really clear in terms of the advantages of building and designing something in the context of its location in the world. But what are the risks of not doing that?

THEO AGELOPOULOS: The number one risk is always cost. If you make bad decisions during the planning and design phase, that will basically get amplified during construction. A good example would be where you're going to build something above the ground and below the ground. The minute you dig something in the ground, if you don't know what's underneath, you amplify the cost of construction, which then drives massive change orders back to the owner. So our ability to have better insights, better context, and better information minimizes a lot of the risk that ultimately happens during the project delivery stages.

HOST: Like most businesses, Theo, your industry is grappling with data management. There's an increase in the amount of data and the velocity of data. There's so much data to try to understand, and determining what's relevant is getting much harder. How do you help organizations navigate that with your technology and, in many cases, paired with Esri's technology?

THEO AGELOPOULOS: We almost have too much data. We went from three decades ago, when it was unaffordable to collect data, and a good example is traditional surveys. You could only collect so much data due to cost. Now, using reality capture and other types of capture techniques, we have too much data. It's about how you filter down a lot of that data into usable and relevant data to support the particular job you're trying to do.

Esri has developed lots of great tools and data management platforms to be able to consume a lot of that data, filter that data, and deliver it to Autodesk design applications to create geospatial context. Now we can consume that data, and the more accurate it is, the better the decisions we can make during the design and construction process.

I think we're entering this world where data management is a critical part of the project life cycle, whether it be a road or a building, et cetera.

HOST: And is that equivalent to the idea or the concept of digital project delivery that I've heard mentioned?

THEO AGELOPOULOS: Yes. Digital project delivery is about not just managing data. It's about managing people and connecting the right people and the right processes at the right time. So when you think about a project as it enters from planning into design and construction, you go potentially from having a small number of planners to hundreds of different disciplines coming together over a certain period of time to coordinate work and to manage risk.

That's where certainly our focus on the Autodesk side is: How do you make sure architects and engineers, whether they're civil engineers, mechanical engineers, or electrical engineers, all coordinate their work and are able to ensure they make good decisions at the right time?

HOST: And facilitates that collaboration, communication, and clarity of what you're all trying to accomplish.

THEO AGELOPOULOS: Exactly.

HOST: Establishing trust is tricky in business and in building. How do you build more collaboration in the design culture?

THEO AGELOPOULOS: I think there are multiple ways. First, when you manage such a complex ecosystem of partners, you have to deliver a platform that has a high level of precision and controls, and the ability to audit a lot of the decisions that happen through the design and delivery process.

The reality is we operate in a very litigious environment, so engineers and contractors need to prove or validate a lot of the decisions they make. That's critical as part of the data management platform they use in a design and construction space.

HOST: So you're not leaving the trust to chance. You're actually providing the tools and the precision and the accuracy that people can trust, validate, and make sure that they're buying in.

THEO AGELOPOULOS: Correct. And I would say the other part of that is, and a big area that we've been working very closely with Esri, a lot of the input data that goes into the design and construction process needs to be high-trust and low-error data.

So if you think about the different phases, be it planning, design, construction, and operations, we want to make sure that the data flows seamlessly between those phases. A lot of the interoperability work we've been doing with Esri has been to ensure low risk and high trust of that data progressing through the project life cycle.

HOST: More and more, we're changing a building's purpose as years go on. Factories become apartments, office buildings start to incorporate retail and have pop-up shops. But some of these older buildings need large systemic changes in order to retrofit or repurpose. How does Autodesk help engineers and architects address the challenges with that retrofitting or repurposing of older buildings? And how does location and the incorporation of location also assist in that manner?

THEO AGELOPOULOS: I'd say the industry has made a lot of progress when it comes to greenfield types of projects, so new projects. We still see, believe it or not, a lot of 2D use when it comes to renovation and retrofit.

The problem with that is that if you think about why we're actually renovating and retrofitting a lot of these buildings, and what some of the different requirements are, sustainability is a really good one. You need to make different types of decisions now when you're retrofitting. And in order to make better sustainability decisions, it's a combination of using a lot of models to analyze different types of conditions and picking different types of materials for a lot of these building assets.

To do that, the better environment is to do it in a building information modeling workflow process. That's why it's critically important to capture those existing assets in 3D, turn them into BIM models, and apply different types of analyses and simulations to ensure that we're meeting the needs of the owner.

Depending on what outcome the owner wants, we want to make sure we reduce carbon, pick sustainable materials, and optimize the space. This is what the power of BIM really is.

HOST: Could you give me an example of the process of retrofitting and how using a BIM model and a BIM process married with location is informed by the geospatial aspect? Is there an example that people would understand?

THEO AGELOPOULOS: Number one, we still continue to see more and more people moving to large cities. Urbanization is not going away. There's a shortage of housing, so we see lots of commercial real estate beginning the process of being retrofitted into multifamily types of homes.

The first thing that has to happen is you need to make decisions on what type of retail mixed use you want to deliver as a real estate developer. The standards of what you deliver in a building now look very different today than they did, say, 20 or 30 years ago. Things like carbon, minimizing energy use, and walkability all come into play.

In order to make a lot of those decisions, you need geospatial context. Once you have a lot of those inputs, you need to capture that asset, or that building, in a digital way to then begin the design and retrofit process. Architects need to use different, more modern approaches in optimizing the spaces.

This is where we're starting to see more and more AI being implemented, different types of analysis and simulations implemented in order to help the architect make good decisions. Then the engineers need to essentially take a lot of those decisions and make them real from an engineering perspective, because we don't want that building to fall down. It needs to be delivered safely and on time.

You can begin to see that it just continues to drive many different points of decision-making throughout the process. And then, of course, you have the contractor who now is not going into a new space. It's a retrofitted space. So they need to make different types of decisions around temporary structures, how they're actually going to renovate and retrofit this with people in an existing space. You need project controls or a data management environment that allows them to do that safely, and that's one of the most critical criteria for them.

It isn't just cost and time. It's safety. You can be more expensive or you can take longer, and that's not a good thing. What's more important is ensuring that people deliver those projects and go home at night.

HOST: We mostly learn through mistakes as a human species. Are there lessons you wish your clients or your users could learn without those costly mistakes?

THEO AGELOPOULOS: I think one of the big premises behind building information modeling is optimizing a lot of your decision-making. A good example would be architects love to create complex shapes. That's the creative part, I would say, of design. Engineers obviously have to then figure out how to actually deliver and build that in a practical way.

When engineers are designing and you bring the structural engineering components, building beams and columns together with complex mechanical, electrical, and plumbing ecosystems, in many cases you find a pipe running through a beam. You don't want to make that correction in the field. You want to course-correct well before you get into construction.

HOST: And that might require compromise.

THEO AGELOPOULOS: That might require a beam moving. It may require a pipe moving. In many cases, the owner has to decide what's the cheaper alternative and what's the better outcome. It comes down to trade-offs, I would say. You want to make decisions earlier in the project life cycle, and the earlier you make those decisions, the less risky and the less likely you are to be over time, over budget.

What I would say is, in order to use building information modeling, you need to invest your time in building great spatial context, and that's why it's critically important and why GIS is a critical input into the BIM process. Understand what context you really need to have. Invest your time early in building high-fidelity digital models that then allow you to make good decisions throughout the process.

HOST: I always love to wrap up, Theo, with a question about what you see in the future of BIM modeling and the design industry in the next five, 10, 20 years.

THEO AGELOPOULOS: I think we're entering this new era. It's going to be super exciting. Some people think maybe too transformative, but we're entering this new era around artificial intelligence changing the way humans interact with machines.

A lot of the work that happens today is going to be automated. I believe that AI is not going to replace architects and engineers and contractors. I think those architects, engineers, and contractors that use AI will replace those that don't. So we need to decide as an industry what is high-value work versus what is low-value work, and where do we really invest in driving automation using things like AI? And then how do we take people and move them to be doing high-value work versus low-value work?

We're in this next phase of automation and augmentation that will drive better decision-making, but also will change the landscape of what architects, engineers, and contractors do going forward.

HOST: Theo, thank you so much for joining me today. I really enjoyed our conversation.

THEO AGELOPOULOS: It's a pleasure. Thank you.

NARRATOR: Thanks for listening to the Esri and the Science of Where podcast. If you liked this episode, please share it with a colleague.