This feature provides a deeper version of content on emerging technologies, with more analysis on curated news and more product news by (emTech) companies. It is exclusive to annual subscribers of architosh INSIDER Membership.

Special Feature

We published a special feature titled, “The M1 Mac mini vs iMac Pro vs Everyone.”

The Apple M1 chip is an inflection point in the computer industry, marking a third and hopefully final chip transition in Apple’s Mac platform history. 

IT WASN’T THAT LONG AGO THAT AMD stole Intel’s single-core performance crown with its Zen 3 chip architecture in the new Ryzen 5000 series CPUs. Now, less than a year later, Apple has come out with a chip (M1) that delivers a stunning performance of its own, and at least by one benchmark is the new reigning single-core performance champion.

But just how powerful is the M1 as compared to rival hardware options out there? And how well might this chip perform in CAD and 3D application environments? These were the questions I sought to answer ever since Architosh obtained a new (late 2020) Mac mini with an M1 processor.

I already knew Apple Silicon was a possible game-changer. And I had heard stunning praise from CAD industry software developers. But could a sub-1000 dollar machine really be a serviceable CAD/3D machine for professionals? After many benchmarks and real-world app tests (under Rosetta 2.0 no less), the short answer is “yes!”

To read the full story, click here to Xpresso #24 You can subscribe to Xpresso here; it’s free!

The Top Ten Must-Reads

I’ve combed the Internet to find the most interesting, compelling, or controversial stories about the AEC and manufacturing industries, and the social and emerging technological forces at play on both:

1 – Renewed Efforts for a Universal BIM Standard Is a story over at Architect magazine that discusses the technical and non-technical challenges that must be overcome to reach a true OpenBIM standard in the US.    (Architect Magazine)

What’s essential in this story?   AIA data says that BIM software has increased significantly since 2005, with all respondents in over 50-sized firms saying they use BIM software in some capacity. However, with the increased adoption comes more pressures for universal standards, benchmarks, and file format interoperability in any BIM compatible software. This is a good read that covers all the bases.

2 – Op-ed: Tackling Biden’s climate challenge with artificial (and human) intelligence. Yale’s Phil Bernstein and others take on what it would take and mean to hit US President Joe Biden’s call for “zero net energy buildings at zero net cost.”   (Architects Newspaper)

Some highlights  Designing such zero net energy buildings at costs that reflect building conventionally will be a massive challenge, but the authors warn that we shouldn’t forget about making positive contributions to architecture and care deeply about the impact of architecture on neighborhoods and the urban fabric. The authors posit that AI may be the key to meeting this challenge—beautiful zero net energy buildings at zero net cost.

3 – 3D-printed home on Long Island hits the market at USD 300,000. Today the news broke across the Internet on this first 3D-printed home on Long Island’s North Shore that hit the market for USD 300.000.  (Architects Newspaper)

First 3D-printed house in America to receive a certificate of occupancy and hit the open real estate market. (Image: SQ4D)

What is essential in this story?  Just an hour east of the US’s first post-WWII mass-produced suburb, a new experiment in housing is taking place. A three-bedroom home with two full baths and a spacious open plan hit the market. The concrete house was 3D printed using patent-pending technology from Long Island-based SQ4D and their Autonomous Robotic Construction System (ARCS). The house is the first of its kind in the US to obtain a certificate of occupancy.

In other related news, L&T Construction made India’s first 3D printed two-story building. And this story here discusses why 3D printing in construction is one of the fastest-growing segments in the construction industry.

4 – Boston Dynamics introduces new Spot Robot products. The robot dog is clearly a hit and recently we shared that it was now living with Foster & Partners working in the field as a good little robot.  (Equipment Journal)

What is new?   Boston Dynamics is now offering Spot Enterprise, Scout, and Spot Arm. These new products add value and abilities to the robot dog. Spot Enterprise is a new version of Spot with greater capabilities. Scout is a web-based software that enables control of a fleet of Spots. Spot Arm enables users to act on data insights.  

5 – Xerox Takes on Supply Chain Complexity and Fragility with Metal 3D Printing. This manufacturing story at Forbes discusses how Xerox has entered the 3D additive manufacturing industry with new 3D metal printers, addressing both complex changes afoot in manufacturing, including new supply chain pressures brought about by the global pandemic.  (Forbes)

The Xerox ElemX 3D printer. (Image: Xerox)

Big Picture?  Xerox is following HP’s lead in 3D printing. Here we have two conventional 2D printing giants entering the 3D printing industry very late but acquiring smaller companies already in the space. 

6 –  What is a Construction Control Room and Why Do You Need One?  This blog post from Buildots talks about looking at the construction control and monitoring process similar to a mission control room at NASA.   (Buildots)

Relevancy? — The construction industry has been plagued with zero to slight productivity gains since the onset of the ICT (information communications technologies) revolution, compared to the gains made in almost all other industries. The low rate of “digitization” is largely to blame. Simply put, while the rest of the world’s industries have learned how to benefit from the innovations of the ICT revolution, construction has lagged in its understanding of how to tap digital tools for improving its economic outcomes. 

Economists characterize each successive industrial revolution (or techno-economic paradigm) shift as being driven by a primary invention. The invention’s influence extends from its dramatically wide ability to impact and benefit nearly every industrial and even non-industrial activity. Another term attributed to the key invention of an industrial revolution cycle advancement is “key factor” or sometimes called by economists “core input.” Economists Chris Freeman writes that all key factors of each techno-economic paradigm shift fulfill three conditions and we can look at those conditions in relation to construction in a moment. They are:

(1) Clearly perceived low and rapidly falling relative cost.

(2) Apparently, almost unlimited availability of supply over long periods

(3) Clear potential for the use or incorporation of the key factor or factors in many products. 

For the ICT era, the key factor is the computer chip (as invented by Intel), measured in industrial economic terms as “operations per cost” (operations per thousand US dollars, for example). A second internal key factor in ICT is the “data transmission size per second” (over the Internet, for example). In the case of the invention of the Internet, the first key factor (microprocessors) is a significant driver of performance advancement of the secondary key factor (Internet speed performance). 

It has been noted by economists studying industrial-economic revolutions that small changes on the relative input cost structure have very little effect on the behaviors of engineers, designers, and researchers. Only big and persistent changes have the power to transform the operational common sense procedures within industries. (see: Architosh, “Synergy and Alignment — APIs Democratizing Role,” 3 Oct 2020)

As we stated in the article just referenced, “this means that innovations that seem to speak to new modes of procedural structure in industrial processes but don’t generate rapidly falling relative costs will not yield take-up and re-organization.”  Thus, all digitization has meant to the field of construction since the advent of the computer is that it is perceived to have very little chance to generate rapidly falling relative costs. But this is now starting to change as emerging technologies like drones, laser scanners, 3D cameras, AR, and digital design and fabrication (DDaF) process models. 

BUILDOT’s solution is 360-degree cameras mounted on hardhats. The video data is converted into a digital twin model that is compared against a BIM model by AI to measure progress and safety issues.

Buildots blog post makes the point that “control room” while commonly associated with NASA actually has its roots in manufacturing. The idea is a room that provides a centralized view of automated processes with continue tracking and measuring of progress. As they state, “one of the main challenges on a construction project includes accessing all of the data from the site and being able to structure it in such a way to get meaningful insights that can be analyzed and actioned accordingly.” Usually, the loss of construction productivity takes place through poor planning when a sub-contractor should arrive but is late and a stage in the work waits for that sub to arrive to do the work, or when a sub-contractor is working at a slower than usual pace and the general contractor is unaware that they are behind schedule.

Buildots solution is aimed at solving that last issue, with hardhat mounted 360-degree cameras. The data is used to create a digital twin 3D model that is compared to a BIM model obviously developed to a high LOD. AI algorithms are then used to automatically generate reports via a comparison between the two models. 

An image of the BUILDOT software system.

One way of looking at this specific technology is to compare it to how it relates to the “key factor(s)” for the current ICT era. Does this process benefit from “operations per cost” in microprocessors? Does this process benefit from advancements in “data transmission size per second”? Or do the three conditions for a key factor actually apply to a new invention, a new “core input”? It is possible the answer is yes, yes, and yes. 

For example, forward-looking falling costs in chips means that chips may be embedded in the camera-helmets in the near future. Paired with a smart device, insights might be processed in near real-time while walking around the job site, not just later in a control room. A real-time insight would enable a job super to make an instruction to a sub-contractor on the spot. This happens today without the use of any technology when experienced supers identify issues while walking the construction site. But only if the super can spot the issue. This is where “granularity” comes into play. And that is where AI algorithms can play an outsized role. 

7 –  The Architect of Modern Algorithms —  Barbara Liskov pioneered the modern approach to writing code. She warns that the challenges facing computer science today can’t be overcome with good design alone.  (Quanta)

What’s fascinating about this story?  — Likely, like me, you have never heard of Liskov, a 2008 Turing Award winner and a member of the team at MIT that created the first programming language that did not rely on “goto” statements. That programming language was CLU, short for “cluster,” and relied on an approach she invented called “data abstraction.” Every modern language today descends from that model of data abstraction. 

This article has a lot of interesting takeaways. Liskov says at one point that AI is an application, not a core discipline. But the larger importance of this story is the stunning info on how male-dominated fields like mathematics and computer science actually were (or perhaps are?) back in her time, back in the early ’70s and 80s. Liskov would eventually head the computer science department at MIT, but when she started teaching there the ratio was about 10:1000 in favor of men. 

8 –  Chipmaking is being redesigned. Effects will be far-reaching. — The chipmaking industry is booming. The capitalization of the world’s listed semiconductor firms now exceeds 4 trillion USD, 4x over what they were worth just five years ago.  (Economist)

So what’s the problem, sounds good to me?  But in actuality, while chip designs are become more diverse and more specialized, while also general purposes chips are being reduced in size and power requirements to be placed in every “manner of device” in the IoT (Internet of Things) era, at the opposite side of the chip ecosystem are the reduced number of firms that are capable of actually manufacturing ever-increasingly small and specialized chips. In fact, just three firms are able to manufacture advanced chips: Intel, TSMC, and Samsung. The problem is, 80 percent of that manufacturing capability is now in Asia. 

And then there are the design side changes. It seems gone are the days when folks got their chips from folks like Intel, IBM, and AMD. Now, software companies are designing chips of their own, including Amazon, Google, Apple, and now soon Microsoft. And then there is a wealth of startups like Cerebras (American)—we talked about them in issue #23 last month—Graphcore (British), and others like Nuvia, which we discuss in our special feature in Xpresso #24. This last company is being acquired by chipmaker Qualcomm. 

9 –  A new Hub for Danish Robot Developers —  3XN—which is an architecture firm with an advanced research laboratory component called GXN—has designed a new joint home for Universal Robots (UR) and Mobile Industrial Robots (MiR) in Odense, Denmark.  (BD+C)

The skinny and importance?  The new facility will house most of both organization’s activities, creating the world’s largest hub for cobots (collaborative robots that work and interact with humans). 

10 –  Exploring the use of artificial intelligence in architecture —   This article talks about research at the University of Michigan exploring the use of AI to create new architectural designs.   (Tech Xplore)

The interesting and novel. — Matias del Campo and Sandra Manninger, two of the researchers first got involved with AI in architecture prior to 2006, where they worked with Dr. Author Flexer at the Austrian Institute of Artificial Intelligence (OFAI) and held the first course in machine learning for architecture at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna, in 2006. 

“Our past papers, including ‘A Question of Style’, ‘Imaginary Maps’ , and ‘Machine Hallucinations’ form the backbone of our recent study,” del Campo said. “The main objective of all these works was to open AI for architecture applications and there are several opportunities to do so. They cover an area that reaches from solutions for optimization problems to novel territories for the interrogation of philosophical questions such as aspects of agency, authorship, and sensibility. In our opinion, this is the very first genuinely 21st-century design technique.”

One dramatic outcome of their research was this. “We realized that there is something the human brain can do that AIs cannot do so well yet: recognize the potential of turning an error into a creative solution.” The two researchers are working on two books on AI in architecture, to be published in 2021 and 2022. “The first book discusses the theoretical implications of using AI to produce architectural designs, touching on aspects such as agency, authorship, and design in a post-human/automated world. The second book, on the other hand, outlines the technical aspects associated with the use of AI in architecture.”

Curated content: Emerging Technologies and their potential impact on CAD-based industries

Apple Entering the VR-AR Headset Market – The New!

A lot of folks have been waiting for this news for a long time. You see, Apple’s Macs have poor VR headset support, and it’s just unacceptable.

Dan Riccio Stepped Down to Focus on AR/VR

Over at Ars Technica, they are covering a story today about Apple’s hardware chief stepping down to take-over full-time leadership on Apple’s long-rumored VR/AR headset.

Last month Apple announced hardware chief Dan Riccio would be stepping down to focus full-time on a special project. But Apple didn’t mention what that product was. Now a report from Silicon Valley publication The Information has revealed what is really going on. (Image: Apple)

Apparently, the VR headset hit a snag under current project leader Mike Rockwell. Rockwell will stay in place but report to Riccio, who will be the top point person in charge. Apple reportedly has over 1,000 engineers focused on this new VR/AR headset device.

A few days ago, The Verge reported that Apple’s rumored VR headset could cost USD 3,000. But if so, the good news is it will feature 8K displays and over a dozen cameras. The Information has a self-created drawing based on “internal Apple images of a late-stage prototype from last year,” and the design features a very lightweight fabric mesh material that helps keep it lightweight on your head, plus design cues from other Apple devices like swappable Apple Watch-style headbands and HomePod-esq mesh fabric.

The device will apparently feature power-hungry 8K displays but not everywhere. Instead, eye-tracking technology will determine where you are looking and set the 8K resolution in just that area and render peripheral areas in lower resolution—a method known as foveated rendering in the VR world. That’s a technique used by Finnish industrial-strength VR/XR-3 headset maker Varjo.

Apple’s VR headset would include some AR functionality, include LiDAR technology like Varjo’s recent advancement (the first to use LiDAR), and be powered by Apple Silicon (a chip as powerful as the M1 is likely). Apple’s patents on its VR headset include names like Avi Bar-Zeev as an inventor. He is the creator of the Microsoft Hololens. He left Apple in 2019.

Further Analysis & Commentary:  Apple’s delay in producing a VR headset has never made any sense. Macs’ absence of suitable VR capabilities has been a serious drag on Mac adoption in not just gaming but pro markets like Architecture. While this estimated price is steep, it is similar to Varjo’s professionally-oriented headset, a device that has found a very successful market in the automotive and aerospace simulation industries.

A best-of-breed VR device from Apple that provided unique capabilities on the macOS platform would more than make-up for Apple’s truancy with virtual reality hardware. I guess that this new VR device will arrive simultaneously with the new Apple Silicon-based Mac Pro machines, possibly in Q4-2021.

Tech Soft 3D on Apple, Plus M1

Tech Soft 3D is getting ready for Apple’s macOS transitions, including the deprecation of OpenGL and preferential move to Apple Metal, plus Apple Silicon support.

Tech Soft 3D CTO Gavin Bridgeman said that the company is advancing on both fronts quickly to support developer partners. Moving to support Metal has been relatively smooth thus far, he says. “We already have an abstraction layer in there, so we just need to build and finish our Metal driver, our OpenGL driver, and our DirectX driver, and our tools will look at the system and determine which should be used,” he says.

Erik Hultgren, product manager at Tech Soft 3D, added, “so even though Windows is our dominant platform—and we are starting to see that for a lot of developers their multiplatform strategy is around using the Web—we do have enough users on the Mac that when Apple switched to Metal we wanted to lead there.” He adds, “so we are serious about getting Metal done because some of our biggest partners are on Apple iOS and macOS platforms.”

Bridgeman and Hultgren said that Tech Soft 3D now has a fully dedicated team working on updating their toolkits for Apple Silicon and Metal. “They are doing nothing but building out that dedicated macOS driver,” adds Hultgren. He says there are actually two teams, one in France and one in America, working on it.”

SolidWorks was the one company anxious to get Tech Soft 3D going on support for Apple Silicon. It wasn’t SolidWorks, however, but eDrawings, the CAD tool that is supported on many different platforms that generated high interest from the MCAD giant.

Familiar with ARM Platform

“We have done work with our toolkits for supporting ARM on the Hololens, so we have done work on ARM already,” says Hultgren. The Microsoft Hololens 2 is run by an ARM processor. Previously it was an X86 processor but today runs on an ARM-based Qualcomm Snapdragon 850 chip based on the ARM cortex technology.

The beauty of Tech Soft 3D and their toolkits is they isolate their partners from feeling the brunt of these OS changes. “They don’t have to change a line of code,” says Hultgren. “We give them the libraries, and they are up and running!”

The M1 support is in beta now out at partners, but the official release will likely be timed with their mid-summer product update.

BIM News

ArchDaily has a good story about the Quebec Wood Export Bureau and their new free BIM plugin on Revit.

A view of the Offsite Wood plugin app running inside Autodesk Revit. (Image: QWEB)

The app is called Offsite Wood and helps architects select product families that have the right dimensions, fire resistance, and sustainability profile to meet their needs.

What’s Cooking: Future Xpresso Features

We have recently spoken to The Wild founder and CEO, Gabe Paez about his company’s latest features and how the global pandemic has impacted AEC creatives and driven up interest in VR technologies like his company’s innovative The Wild platform.

The Wild has a new feature called Tours. And it came during the pandemic with great aid to AEC pros using The Wild’s VR collaboration platform. (Image: The Wild / Architosh)

The Tours features enable users to craft a story that will focus everyone around a user’s desired framing. But there is so much more going on at The Wild and great perspectives from Paez about the future of this kind of technology. Don’t miss next month’s issue.

We look forward to sharing this story in Xpresso #25 in March.

Closing Notes

Another item on my mind is explaining to you all that the Xpresso Index and Glossary are still on the horizon. It has been moved back to Q1, 2021 to align with other Architosh site development updates.

The post Member Access — (emTech) Section Plus for Xpresso #24 appeared first on Architosh.

(emTech) Section Plus is about providing “more” content on emerging technologies—the primary topic of the Xpresso newsletter. This deeper version of (emTech) is provided exclusively for annual subscribers of architosh INSIDER Membership.

Special Feature

We published a special feature titled, “2021 Tech Trends — CAD/3D Industry Executives Share Thoughts.”

We look at technology trends in CAD and 3D industries from the vantage point of long-arc trends and the impact of the pandemic context. 

IN A POST-PANDEMIC WORLD, WHAT TECH TRENDS will have emerged, accelerated, or changed for us all in the years ahead? And specifically—what impacts will there be in the CAD and 3D industries?

To answer these questions, CAD and 3D industry executives share perspectives that are naturally impacted by the global COVID-19 pandemic. Firms and individuals around the globe have had to make numerous adjustments to live-work life arrangements. Many of these changes will remain with us for years to come. Additionally, we look at long-arc tech trends and how the pandemic context has possibly impacted them. But first, five trends for 2021.

Trend 1: Mobility is Heightened

This is both the most obvious and most interesting trend with respect to the pandemic context. To get the best sense of what is happening across multiple CAD and 3D industry segments, we had the good fortune of Lenovo approaching us to discuss 2021 trends. Speaking to a world-leader in workstation computer hardware added insights we might not get from software folks.

Chris Ruffo, Worldwide Segment Manager, Architecture, Engineering, and Product Development, Lenovo, told us the pandemic had altered the mobility parameter in computing. “Mobility is going to be the new norm,” he says. “We believe this is going to continue, and many of the things that our customers learned in the past year are going to be a part of their permanent workflow.”

With professionals forced to work from home, the CAD and 3D industries faced myriad challenges—from computer power, collaboration to data storage. These three core challenges drove the importance of other trends listed below. But the initial factor facing the closures of offices was, “how do I bring my work home?”

To read the full story, click here to Xpresso #23. You can subscribe to Xpresso here; it’s free!

The Top Ten Must-Reads

I’ve combed the Internet to find the most interesting, compelling, or controversial stories about the AEC and manufacturing industries, and the social and emerging technological forces at play on both:

1 – The U.S. Capitol wasn’t designed for an insurrection, is the title of this FastCompany piece by Mark Wilson. This an excellent article that discusses the long-standing observation that the U.S. Capitol building is a security challenge. “It’s kind of easy to defend a closed installation—an army base or nuclear plant. Nobody gets in. If you get over the fence, we shoot you. But we’re talking about the place we invite the public to, and [want them to] feel welcome,”   (FastCompany)

The Capitol east front at night. (Image: Martin Falbisoner, Wikicommons)

So Washington DC was designed to be open?  Indeed, that is the case. Pierre Charles L’Enfant designed DC in the grand classical architecture style, and the gesture was aspirational. “It wasn’t meant to feel exclusive or fortress-like. The city is one big symbolic gesture to what the nation is supposed to be.”

2 – Beyond the Master Builder: How Robots Can Really Transform the Role of the Architect. Boston Dynamics construction manager Brian Ringley sees invaluable opportunities for robotics that have little to do with automating building construction and installation.  (Architecture Magazine)

A means and methods debate?  Absolutely! “This file-to-field approach, challenging even for the few vertically integrated organizations currently capable of its execution, is infeasible to implement in today’s prevailing risk-averse and siloed design-bid-build delivery model.”

3 – Week in Tech: A New Model Predicts the Impact of Climate Change on Cities. ‘University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign’ researchers have completed a study on climate change that predicts the temperatures in certain urban areas will, on average, increase between 1.9C and 4.4C by the end of the century. (Architect Magazine)

What is the call to action? The full research findings are published here on Nature. The findings call for multi-modal global projections of local urban climates for climate-sensitive development and to support green infrastructure intervention as a means to reduce urban heat stress on large cities. 

4 – How robots could save one of the world’s most unusual cathedrals.  “Barcelona’s most famous landmark has all the makings of a fantastic blockbuster movie: politically savvy priests, robots, vigilante revolutionaries, the husband of the Virgin Mary, a seemingly mad but brilliant architect, vandals, desecrators, and 138 years of a still-unfolding plot.”   (CNN Style)

Closing in on the finish line. This article covers the history of Antoni Gaudi’s masterpiece, The Basilica de la Sagrada Familia, in Barcelona, Spain. It discusses architect Mark Burry’s role in the completion of the basilica and the use of computers to solve some of the toughest challenges facing its completion. The estimated construction finish for Gaudi’s masterwork is now aimed for 2026, marking the 100th anniversary of Gaudi’s death. 

5 –  3D Printers May Be Toxic to Humans.  In what is certainly of deep concern to advocates of this emerging technology, 3D printers may, in fact, be bad for us—or at least until we learn to protect ourselves during their use.  (Forbes)

What’s the risk? 3D printers can emit toxic particles during their operations. A study presented at the 2020 Society for Risk Analysis virtual Annual Meeting in December showed that the particles released during the printing process could affect indoor air quality and public health. The melting of plastic filaments and other similar materials tend to release volatile compounds into the air near the printer and the object. Read here to learn more. 

6 – Foster + Partners adopts Spot the Boston Dynamics robot dog.  Top global architecture firm Foster + Partners has employed the robot dog Spot by Boston Dynamics to oversee construction at Battersea Power Station in London. (Dezeen)

How are they using Spot?  Spot hold scanners on his back and he walks around the site regularly scanning the site to monitor progress. Readers are already aware Spot can walk up and downstairs and over tough terrain. The data is sent back to the office where it is used to build a “digital twin” model of the project as it is built. Spot has its own sensors but at Battersea Spot carries additional equipment. The robot can carry up to 14 kilograms of equipment. 

7 – A Trillion-Transistor Chip That Just Left a Supercomputer in the Dust.  “The history of computer chips is a thrilling tale of extreme miniaturization. The smaller, the better is a trend that’s given birth to the digital world as we know it. So, why on earth would you want to reverse course and make chips a lot bigger?” (SingularityHub)

Wafer Scale Compute by Cerebras breaks record-setting CFD (computational fluid dynamics) score, in fact, complete the task faster than real-time. In other words, this computer can tell you what is going to happen in the future. This can be used in aerospace applications, among other applications including AI.

A chip so fast it can tell what is going to happen in the future! This chip has 1.2 trillion transistors, compared to 16 billion in Apple’s new M1 chip. It is the size of an iPad. Why make such a large chip? Cerebras, its maker, is hoping for innovations in AI and simulations of the physical world. How fast is it? Housed in a CS-1 computer, the Cerebras Wafer-Scale Engine (Cerebras WSE) executed a complex fluid dynamics simulation 200 times faster than the Joule 2.0 supercomputer. In fact, the CS-1 with the WSE chip was faster than real-time. In other words, it can tell you what is going to happen in the future. 

Cerebras Wafer Scale Engine, the world’s largest chip ever built. 56x the size of the largest GPU.

Why is it so fast?  Supercomputers are made up of many chips all tied together through data interconnects. Cerebras WSE in the CS-1 contains just one chip and essentially cuts out the commute time. The interesting implication for this work with Cerebras is the idea of making chips actually larger. The CS-1 is the size of an undercabinet refrigerator. 

8 – Robots Made of Ice Could Build and Repair Themselves on Other Planets.  Ice is all over the solar system, and exploring robots could use it as a structural material.  (IEEE)

IceBot is a proof of concept robot made of ice. (Image: GRASP Lab)

How would it work? Robots aren’t designed to self-report like in Star Wars. If their parts break they need material resources to fix them, even if they are smart enough to repair things. That’s where ice comes in, as it is everywhere on Mars, for example. 

9 – The smart city news that shaped 2020  Smart Cities Dive identified 20 stories detailing the prevalent and groundbreaking trends that influenced a year like no other.  (SmartCitiesDive)

A highlight story example:  One story is about the town or city library as a smart city hub for digital intelligence. As a source of information already, libraries are increasingly playing a role in smart city initiatives. 

10 – The future of airport design after COVID-19  The global COVID-19 pandemic has changed almost all aspects of life and facilities. Airports have especially been affected.  (Construction Specifier)

Future airport design. Big changes are potentially coming to airport design, aimed at helping to stop the pandemic from getting worse and doing the same for future pandemics. At the center of new “design changes” will be how space is used throughout the airport complex, including outside the terminal buildings. Areas where congregation happens today in airports, like at registration and ticket desks, will be eliminated and those processes will happen elsewhere, even at home using smartphones and apps to manage processes like check-in. Materials will change too to allow for new photocatalytic devices and auto-cleaning materials. And AI will be everywhere. 

Curated content: Emerging Technologies and their potential impact on CAD-based industries

Algorithms-aided Design (AAD) News:

ComputationalDesign: NEXT 3.0 The Past, Present & Future: Two-Day online interactive conference with global frontiers with live presentations, tutorials, interactive sessions, live mentorships, and panel discussions. (ArchDaily)

This event takes place this January. The third in a series. Go here to register and learn more.

This event takes place this January. The third in a series. Go here to register and learn more.

ACADIA 2020 went huge in 2020! Due to the global pandemic, the annual ACADIA (Association for Computer-Aided Design in Architecture) conference went virtual and in doing so had a massive turnout! More important, perhaps, the conferences’ developments from the pandemic context may include things that can present in future ACADIA conferences. (ArchNewspaper)

New Digital Tools in a Post-Pandemic World:

Emerging Tools:  Due to the global pandemic, we have all had to make adjustments, in firms, in design and engineering schools, on the job site, in the factory, and at home. Here are some other interesting tools developments with comments.

Nvidia’s Omniverse — We have mentioned this before either on Architosh or in this newsletter. Omniverse works with Universal Scene Description (USD) files and Material Definition Language (MDL) files, both loading, creating, and managing these data sets.

Further Analysis & Commentary:  This technology enables co-collaborative creation and editing of 3D models and scenes—in other words, multiple people working towards the same end goal but as a team and using different tools that can work within the Omniverse system. Huw Roberts, CEO of GRAPHISOFT noted in comments to us for this newsletter that such innovations relate to the creativity coming out of the chaos of 2020, or at least address that chaos. Omniverse predates the global pandemic, but his point is more about how such technology can address this pandemic context quite beautifully. 

Arkio — Is a new beta-level interactive, collaborative 3D workspace. Multiple stakeholders can all interact and design together using various devices from VR headsets to mobile devices. It features push-pull modeling and integrations with Revit.

Further Analysis & Commentary:  We saw glimpses of this kind of technology in The Wild VR software at AU several years ago. Modeling with VR handsets is still quite challenging but will surely become vastly better with time. Arkio is in beta now but looks very promising. The ability to offer participation for stakeholders using different types of hardware is a big key win. It’s been possible for multiple users to meet, collaborate, and work together with VR systems for years, but what typical architectural client has a VR system? 

Conceptboard — this is a new collaborative whiteboard solution with an infinite canvas. You can add in video and numerous file formats onto the canvas. Then pointers with participant names float around as folks work on things together. It supports @mentions, records board history, versions, and edits and has robust role management with access and permissions. Used by corporate giants like Siemens, Lufthansa, Konica-Minolta, plus architecture firms like HOK, Perry Ellis International

Further Analysis & Commentary:  As noted in the Special Feature article on trends, there is a plethora of cloud-based collaborative solutions but few dovetail yet in impactful ways with AEC/BIM solutions. Conceptboard looks very interesting for 2D collaboration and “infinite canvases” are useful for conceptual-stage work. 

Modelo — is devoted to enabling multiple stakeholders to access and view 3D models on any type of device. Users can create a free account. The system supports (ingests) most common 3D formats, including SketchUp, Rhino, Revit, AutoCAD, Navisworks, and other open standards like OBJ and STL. Once your model is stored you can share a URL for access.

What’s Cooking: Future Xpresso Features

So definitely on tap for next month will some beginnings at testing and looking at the Mac mini M1 based machine Architosh now has its hands on. Last month it was still in shipment but our early impressions with general computing the M1 chip is quite fast. We are impressed with multiple aspects of Apple’s macOS on its ARM-based M1.

The new Mac mini with Apple Silicon M1 chip. (Image: Apple / Architosh)

We look forward to sharing this story in Xpresso #24 in February.

Closing Notes

Another item on my mind is explaining to you all that the Xpresso Index and Glossary are still on the horizon. It has been moved back to Q1, 2021 to align with other Architosh site development updates.

The post Member Access — (emTech) Section Plus for Xpresso #23 appeared first on Architosh.

(emTech) Section Plus is about providing “more” content on emerging technologies—the primary topic of the Xpresso newsletter. This deeper version of (emTech) is provided exclusively for annual subscribers of architosh INSIDER Membership.

Special Feature

We published a special feature in Xpresso #22 titled, “Augmented Intelligence: Digital Blue Foam’s Alternative Approach to Generative Design in Architecture.”

Digital Blue Foam may be an architects’ dream generative design partner, as the company says architects want ‘generative design’ to augment their design process, not take them over. 

DO ARCHITECTS REALLY WANT AI TO GENERATE designs from which to choose from? Digital Blue Foam, a software start-up with a growing global footprint, says the answer is “no.”

In some forms of ‘generative design,’ the process begins with loading in the numerical design criteria (something developers can actually do). The architect or developers then respond to dozens if not more generated solutions (options really) that can be further manipulated through various software wizardry, allowing the architect to further fine-tune the results to a ‘Goldilocks’ ideal before shuttling the generated design off to another application—usually a BIM program.

This may be a very appealing workflow from the perspective of real estate developers and building asset managers. But architects are hardly rushing to this process. That’s not how architects really want to work, says the founders at Digital Blue Foam.

To read the full story, click here to Xpresso #22. You can subscribe to Xpresso here, it’s free!

The Top Ten Must-Reads

I’ve combed the Internet to find the most interesting, compelling, or controversial stories about the AEC and manufacturing industries, and the social and emerging technological forces at play on both:

1 – AI Regulatory Guidance issued by White House, The White House’s Office of Management and Budget’s AI Regulatory Guidance was released on 17 November 2020.  Executive Order 13859 “Maintaining American Leadership in Artificial Intelligence,” assumes that the USA is the global leader in AI technologies.   (The White House)

What’s the potential upside? The Executive Order has released a memorandum that outlines policies that can encourage growth in AI, principles of stewardship in AI applications while simultaneously avoiding policies that needlessly hamper innovation and growth. It states, “Where permitted by law, when deciding whether and how to regulate in an area that may affect AI applications, agencies should assess the effect of the potential regulation on AI innovation and growth.” It further stipulates that “promoting innovation and growth in AI is a high priority of the U.S. government.” 

While this is positive news for the AI industry, “regulations” are not outlined in the memorandum. Rather, risks to public trusts in AI are communicated; the U.S. government seeks to build trust in AI technologies. And it seeks to “advance American innovation” and therefore make sure “agencies should keep in mind international uses of AI, ensuring that the United States’ regulatory regime does not disadvantage American companies.”   

2 – Artificial intelligence is helping lower costs, speed up construction projects. This local news story highlights how AI technologies help construction companies save money on their projects by optimizing construction data to eliminate unneeded equipment and manpower. The story highlights a new company to my ears, ALICE Technologies, which says it can save USD 30 million on a USD 500 million project. (7News)

AI optimized construction schedules. ALICE can automatically produce 4D schedules early in the construction planning process. (Image: ALICE Technologies)

What’s the AI tool? ALICE Technologies: artificial intelligence construction engineering, is a Menlo Park, California AI construction software company founded by Rene Markos, a Standford grad with a Ph.D. in Construction Management. ALICE is a construction planning platform powered by AI. With a development office in Prague, the company seems small but growing, counting the likes of Kajima Corp and Takenaka among its heavy-hitter clients.

AI is used to produce hundreds of construction plan options in minutes, similar to how AI is being used in early-stage design AI tools like Spacemaker. (Image: ALICE Technologies)

ALICE looks like it uses generative type algorithms to game-play hundreds of scenarios in construction sequence workflows and optimizes outcomes. It also offers the analysis of costs and schedules’ impact to design changes and does much more. 

3 – Robots Invade the Construction Site This piece on Wired by Will Knight reviews multiple new robotic applications on construction sites, including a new one to our ears, Canvas, a drywall finish robot. Canvas using lidar, cheap low-cost laser scanners, and computer vision to detect the bare drywall walls and sets about finishing the drywall with a smooth plaster finish. (Wired)

Canvas is a new drywall finishing system robot that saves days on drywall finish construction work. (Image: Canvas)

What is essential in this story? This story runs through several other robot companies mentioned before on Xpresso, including Doxel, Buildots, Boston Dynamics, and its robot Spot, and others. Another aspect of this story is that Kevin Albert, co-founder, and CEO of Canvas, was previously at Boston Dynamics. So we are now seeing individuals from leading robotics companies spin out and create new startups.  An IDC report forecast robotics growth in the construction industry will be 25 percent annually through 2023. 

4 –  Architect Martin Miller: taming complexity with digital tools.  This an engaging sit-down with architect Martin Miller, assistant professor of practice in the College of Architecture, Art and Planning (AAP) at Cornell University.  (Cornell Chronicle)

“MaoHaus” in Beijing, China, is an experimental facade that resembles a flowing fabric but is made of concrete. (Image: AntiStatics Architecture)

Any gold nuggets?  Yes! Miller is a partner in a Beijing firm called AntiStatics whose origin starts as a criticism of architecture as a fixed idea—”of existing mantras, manifestos, and ideas”… The firm is doing innovative work worth looking at like MaoHaus above in the image. 

5 – Biden is expected to spur the growth of the smart city tech market. This report says that Frost & Sullivan predict USD 2.46 trillion of business opportunities in smart cities technologies by 2025. Spending on smart city technologies is expected to grow at a CAGR of 22 percent to USD 327 billion by 2025.  (SmartcitiesDive)

The eight parameters of “smart cities” as defined by this research company. (Image: Frost & Sullivan)

Election ramifications? Frost & Sullivan define a “smart city” as embodying at least five of eight parameters. (see image above), which no city in the world has achieved as of yet. “Under a Biden administration, efforts around smart cities can be expected to accelerate,” said Archana Vidyaskekar, research director of Visionary Innovation Group at Frost & Sullivan. 

6 – 8 Smart Cities to Watch in 2020. This article, which oddly lists 8 Smart Cities to watch in 2020, while the article is from this November. Still, the article not only lists 8 interesting cities on this list but explores each city’s “smart city” efforts. (Slate Tech)

What are the 8 Smart Cities to Watch? Aurora, IL, Coral Gables, FL, Colorado Springs, CO, Houston, TX, Jacksonville, FL, Philadelphia, PA, Reno, NV, and Syracuse, NY. It is very interesting to see that not a single “superstar city” is on this list.  So some of the interesting things these 8 smart cities to watch include installing smarter infrastructure at roads, bridges, and traffic lights; installing sensors that provide data on pavement temperatures, AI with video data for public safety, EV readiness programs, carbon to EV conversion for city vehicles, smart street lights to reduce energy, resilient plan-to-smart city alignment efforts, wifi on city buses and trains, flood sensors and more. 

7 – How The Global Pandemic Became an Inflection Point for Drones.  “It’s too early to tell if the pandemic and its impact on in-person business will be the shot in the arm to propel the commercial drone market forward, but companies around the world are rushing to put forth drones that can serve numerous enterprise applications in multiple industries, including construction, agriculture, inspection and food and medicine delivery.” (Forbes)

The Key Takeaways. Global shipments for UAVs for the enterprise alone will reach 2.4 million by 2023, increasing at a 66.8 percent annual growth rate. That’s a healthy growth rate. Amazon missed its estimated 2018 date for Amazon delivery by drone but this past August the company was granted federal approval for its fleet of Prime Air delivery drones. 

DroneDeploy is a leader in the drone market covering many industries besides AEC. Mining, Solar, Agriculture, Oil & Gas.

Food delivery (Uber with McDonald’s), Medical delivery (Zipline), and a host of other industrial sectors are all testing up drone deployment. Readers of Xpresso already know about AEC and infrastructure uses for Drones. Think Doxel and DroneDeploy for example. 

8 – Rumors: Is AMD working on an ARM-based M1 Rival?  “Apple has shaken up the processor industry with the arrival of its M1-powered Macs, offering excellent performance despite being a low-power chip. But could another ARM-based competitor be on its way?” writes Rob Thubron (TechSpot).

Will AMD Enter the ARM Chip Market?  A new rumor says AMD will lift the lid on its own version of an SoC (System on a Chip) processor, to rival Apple’s M1. The rumor is interesting because it says AMD will introduce two versions of its secrete ARM chip, one with integrated RAM (the Apple M1 has integrated memory) and one without. 

Why this will be important. An AMD ARM-based processor could be a safe hedge for the company, though its own Ryzen X86 compliant microarchitecture has won accolades since its introduction with the company delivering highly competitive processors, which TSMC delivers on a 7nm process with the best products. Delivering an ARM chip could help AMD be perceived as being on the bleeding edge of chip developments, as well as positioning itself well for lower-power chip applications, from efficient ARM-based server applications to edge devices and mobiles. A December Steam Survey shows AMD with 26.91 percent of the CPU market. 

9 – Huawei’s 24-core 7nm Kunpeng CPU Allegedly Beats Intel Core i9-9900K.  One of the more interesting developments in computing these days is the disruption in the microprocessor field. On the one hand, we have Apple’s disruption and ARM’s disruption, both playing out. Another disruption is happening in China with Huawei. (Tom’s Hardware)

Huawei’s new Desktop PC line up features new and powerful Chinese-made processors based on the ARM architecture. This another index of the rise of ARM architecture and the fall of Intel’s X86 architecture.

The big takeaway? Smartphone maker Huawei Technologies, a company in the general news over US-China relations issues (see: US State Department, “The United States Further Restricts Huawei Access to US Technology,” 17 August 2020) has launched a new brand of desktop PCs, earlier this year back in the late summer. These machines will not use Intel or AMD processors or X86 architecture chips at all, but rather ARM-based processors known as Kunpeng 920, based on ARM’s Neoverse N1 (codename Ares) microarchitecture. The new PC line is striking looking and reminiscent of IBM and Lenovo design language but with a more industrial edge to it. 

Kunpeng 920 is a 7nm chip that boasts 24-64 cores that run between 2.4 – 3 GHz. Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) was at first producing the chip but cut off ties with Huawei due to new US regulations. The article describes more of the machine’s details, including that it doesn’t run Windows either but rather China’s homemade operating system known as Unified Operating System (UOS) a customized Linux variant that works with ARM. 

Obviously, “allegedly beats” a very fast Intel chip is just a claim. Part of the issue of testing these machines and this processor is the compatibility issue with its OS with the regular applications and test suites that are common in the West. Huawei Technologies has also placed the Kunpeng 920 processor inside its Atlas 800 server, in fact, two of them. Russian News Agency has a good story on how Atlas servers with Kunpeng 920 chips are saving lives using AI applications and the Atlas 3001 AI Inference card. 

10 – A 3D Printed Apartment Building is Going Up in Germany.  The ambitions of large 3D printers in the building industry continues unabated. Now a 4,090 square foot building in Wallenhausen, Germany, is being printed. The building is going to be three-stories.  (SingularityHub)

Whose has this tech? The project is a joint-venture between COBOD, a Danish firm making large modular 3D printers for the construction company, and a German supplier of formwork and scaffolding systems. COBOD is also now going to be printing the bases of 650-foot tall GE wind turbines. Back to the German 3D printed building, it will be built of a specially developed cement mixture created by HeidelbergCement for 3D printing.  

The Danish company COBOD makes the BOD2 gantry system based construction 3D printer with an interchangeable nozzle system. It can be mounted to the foundation of a building or movable concrete pillars. (Image: COBOD / All rights reserved.)

The BOD2 is the company’s second-generation construction printer. It is modular and companies who buy it can select the modular size they need. The MOD2 is 3x faster than the BOD, with an 18 meter per minute print speed. These systems that work on large suspended rail-beams hover over construction sites and lay-down concrete and other materials. In the case of their future partnership with GE, COBOD will 3D printing the bases of even larger GE wind turbines, enabling them to reach higher heights which exposes them to stronger winds. When wind turbines were introduced in the 80s the first generation onshore turbines (20 meters tall) generated a maximum output of 100kW per turbine. By 2017, onshore wind turbines reached 84 meters tall and could output 2MW (2000kW). 

Curated content: Emerging Technologies and their potential impact on CAD-based industries

generative design: A Preview of our Spacemaker.ai Talk

Spacemaker.ai is a Norwegian AEC software startup that was recently acquired by Autodesk for USD 240 million in net cash. We have written about the news originally here, then with additional info and insights from Amy Bunzel, Senior Vice President, Autodesk.

Bunzel provided good information not discussed in the news release but I wanted to get deeper on Spacemaker, thus the recent follow-up with them. What follows are some notes from that conversation, while we work on a major Spacemaker feature article coming up. They are pertinent to our Digital Blue Foam feature above and it is interesting to compare both companies. For example, both companies are architect-led and both started with existent problems in architecture practice. This is how Havard Haukeland, the architect, described what led to the founding of Spacemaker.ai.

“I was basically working with the kind of projects that users are using Spacemaker [for] today,” he said, “the early-phase projects, both before users have acquired a site and the years after they have acquired a site, to really find out what to build on the site.”

An image of Spacemaker.ai, showing generated options on the left panel, the main viewport window, and the data palette on the right side. (Image: Spacemaker.ai)

Haukeland told me on our call he was really frustrated that he was not able to deliver what clients really wanted. This was the same message about frustration communicated by Patel about Digital Blue Foam’s practicing architect co-founder, Camiel Weijenberg. So both of these similar companies emerged for a specific set of ‘pain-points’ in architecture practice and the formation of their solutions naturally resemble each other because they both are built upon and reference foundational technologies in the overall constellation of emerging technologies (emTech) in AEC. Namely, machine learning, algorithms-aided design (AAD), or computational design—methods that use algorithms to model based on numerical inputs rather than explicit modeling under the human hand of the computer mouse.

Both companies also arose to address fundamental economic issues. The incremental innovation improvements of traditional modeling, BIM, and CAD tools and the associated design practices (methods of architectural production) are unable to meet demand-side pressures in the market. In simple terms: clients need architects to produce results faster. But not just any results. Clients need better and faster answers at the early stage of the development process.

Here’s one more tidbit from the Spacemaker call. When Havard Haukeland was introduced to eventual co-founder Carl Christensen, a software developer, Christensen initially thought Haukeland must be doing something wrong. He couldn’t believe that was the process architects utilize to answer these early-stage issues.

Special note: Anders Kvale, the third Spacemaker.ai co-founder introduced Haukeland to Christensen.

Further Analysis & Commentary: Both Spacemaker.ai and Digital Blue Foam are emblematic of the next-generation of software that synthetically marries data, AI, or ML algorithms with AAD technology. It appears that input pressures (market demand) are being led by organizations that are further along the adoption cycle of AI and big data technologies than the output organizations. The output organizations include the architects and planners and their established digital tools suppliers. The reason why we hear about frustrations by both sets of founders above, however, likely reflects a matrix of impediments preventing output capacity to match input pressures. 

It is not simply that the tools that most architects use can’t provide what building developers want answers to, the entire architecture and planning production apparatus, which consists of AE firm management formation and operations, is ill-prepared to meet the ‘step-change’ productivity demanded. It is imperative that incumbent software leaders take note of the gap between input pressures and output capacity. The problem is most software companies are customer-led (whether on an agile or classic waterfall model) as most businesses are. This gets into central issues around disruption in Clayton Christensen’s famous The Innovator’s Dilemma. If the AEC industry is the digital (ICT era) laggard we all think it is, isn’t this a very potential bad match-up between organizations in industries that are ICT era forerunners and the larger AEC industry? The foreruns are applying market demand pressures that architects cannot match using tools that are a step-change behind (ie: technologies at a 10x min. multiple differential). 

This is a very different context than the one for the CAD and BIM transformations. CAD developers in the early 1980s were not responding to market pressures on the demand side requesting productivity improvements at such step-change factors over hand-drafting. Many architects resisted moving to CAD for years because they found CAD rigid and inflexible to their overall processes. Early adoption centered CAD at the working drawings stage while designers continued to meet demand by clients with fast traditional hand rendering and drawing skills. Today, the front end of the process is now being hit by big pressures to not just hit deliverables on faster timelines but deliver data-infused and evidence-based results.

An entire article could be devoted to the industrial sectors and take-up of AI and big data and the relationship to input pressures on output side organizations (AE companies and their tools providers). However, I will scan through some of them in the next (emTech) content below, focused on a new AI chip company. 

AI Chip News

SimpleMachines is a new chip company on our radar that was brought to my attention when the CEO reached out to Architosh for a conversation. I was a bit stunned by the reach out, given that Architosh has not published leading-edge information on processors since our information on the AMD GPUs inside the 2013 Mac Pro. (see: Architosh, “The Mac Pro: So what’s a D300, D500 and D700 anyway? We have answers,” 24 October 2013)

Karu Sankaralingham is the CEO of SimpleMachines and he is an academic that has launched a revolutionary new approach to AI-specific microprocessors. I will touch on this AI chip below in brief and then link this conversation with the above one about industrial sectors that are engaging in AI technologies and big data. Companies that take-up AI technologies are speculatively more likely to want to link data and insight into asset operations. This will impact those who provide design and management of those assets (buildings and campuses).

An image of SimpleMachines’ new AI processor. This is the world’s first “algorithm-adaptive” AI chip and is built by TSMC on a 16nm process with packaged HBM2 memory. (Image: SimpleMachines  / Architosh)

The new SimpleMachines Mozart AI chip is a break-through “algorithm-adaptive” processor for fast inference and training. It operates with what the company calls a “composable computing paradigm” that in essence means that using the discovery of four course-grained behaviors that compose any algorithm, Mozart can operate faster AI functions across a broad spectrum of AI domains. Their compiler can respond to future algorithms not yet invented while offering dramatic performance.

Further Commentary: An interesting discovery in this conversation with SimpleMachines was that typical AI (machine learning) algorithms have a dramatic overhead on common CPUs (eg: Intel Skylakek core CPUs) and even GPUs. The overhead can be as high as 95 percent with application compute just the balance of 5 percent. Obviously, there are better ratios but not much better. Overhead is a dramatic problem unless an AI chip is built for a specific set of algorithms for tackling certain problems. SimpleMachines’ Mozart is aimed at creating a general and flexible AI compute architecture that has wide computational advantages (high compute, low overhead) over both CPUs, GPUs, and specialized AI chips. You can learn more here and at an upcoming in-depth feature on Architosh. 

In the meantime, here are some industrial sectors where AI is being deployed. (1) Automotive (connected and self-driving vehicles, driver assistance), (2) FinTech (financial services), (3) Manufacturing (generative design, factory optimization and floor improvements, robotics), (4) Healthcare (image analysis and diagnosis, drug discovery), (5) Retail (personalization, recommendation engines, demand forecasting), and (6) Telecom and Networking. 

Architects, planners, and engineers design assets for all of those industrial sectors. These clients likely are beginning to approach asset design and management borrowing lessons learned from the implementation of AI in their core industry activities. How might these lessons impact architects serving clients in these sectors? Will data from their activities begin to merge with their assets and vice versa? We are seeing it happening now with plant floor optimization. This was an area touched on in the last issue focused on Bentley Systems. (see Xpresso #21, “Bentley’s Now Public—YII20 Highlights and Re-attacking the Architecture Market,” Nov issue, 2020).  

What’s Cooking: Future Xpresso Features

We have several possibilities for the January issue of Xpresso but the market is rapidly adjusting to one very important factor in computing and that is Apple’s new M1 Macs. We will have our own M1 powered Mac mini next week and will begin testing CAD and 3D applications on it for performance comparison. We have noted on Architosh that the ODA has released new SDKs with Apple Silicon support.

Editor’s update: Our new Mac mini with M1 processor has arrived! We begin testing it this coming week.

The new Mac mini with Apple Silicon M1 chip. (Image: Apple / Architosh)

We are really curious to put the M1 Mac through its paces, both at the CPU and GPU level. One thing that we will mention in our SimpleMachines feature coming up on Architosh, is how Apple’s Neural Engine handles AI algorithms versus SimpleMachines.

We look forward to sharing this story in Xpresso #23 in January.

Closing Notes

Another item on my mind is explaining to you all that the Xpresso Index and Glossary are still on the horizon. It has been moved back to Q1, 2021 to align with other Architosh site development updates.

What did Architosh INSIDER members Get?

Member Access—(emTech) Section Plus articles like this one provide architosh INSIDER annual subscribers with more of the content in the (emTech) section of our free monthly newsletter. While this article above features much of the latest issue of Xpresso (#22), there are more and deeper Further Analysis and Commentary sections, more images and inline video.

In addition, the Top Ten Must Reads actually feature 10 curated stories with our commentary and analysis of why we selected them. In Xpresso, only five are provided.

Member Access articles are a premium bonus to annual subscribers that add to the “unlimited site access” nature of your subscription. Thanks for subscribing!

The post Member Access — (emTech) Section Plus for Xpresso #22 appeared first on Architosh.

(emTech) Section Plus is about providing “more” content on emerging technologies—the primary topic of the Xpresso newsletter. This deeper version of (emTech) is provided exclusively for annual subscribers of architosh INSIDER Membership.

Special Feature

We published a special feature in Xpresso 21 titled, Bentley’s Now Public — YII20 Highlights and Re-Attacking the Architecture Market

BENTLEY’S YEAR IN INFRASTRUCTURE 2020 was held virtually this year, following the pattern held by almost all conferences due to the global pandemic. In this article, we want to cover two primary themes, the first being a general summary of highlights on this year’s YII2020 conference and, secondly, a discussion about how Bentley aims to re-engage with architects in the BIM market with its OpenBuildings Designer platform.

Bentley knows from their own award program that their Microstation-based products like OpenBuildings Designer can handle massive projects on the performance front. This is why it has been successful in large infrastructure, whether that infrastructure is vertical or horizontal. “So we need to focus on the larger practices,” said Trierscheid. “They need to feel our rekindling of focus on building and modeling again.”

To read the full story, click here to Xpresso #21. You can subscribe to Xpresso here, it’s free!

The Top Ten Must-Reads

I’ve combed the Internet to find the most interesting, compelling, or controversial stories about the AEC and manufacturing industries, and the social and emerging technological forces at play on both:

1 – Gensler launches Blox, an algorithm-powered design visualization, and computational platform. Nobody should be surprised to hear that a global AEC design giant like Gensler is launching a new digital design platform. The new tool is called Blox and is part of the firm’s inFORM suite of “internally developed proprietary products” created just for Gensler, just to propel the architecture firm’s overall practice abilities.  (LinkedIn Pulse)

A proprietary computational design platform has been created at Gensler. You can see Gensler’s Blox in action in the video below.

What has Gensler said to explain this?  This is important for a range of reasons. Joseph Joseph, partner and global technology director, design technology studio, Gensler, writes that, “We believe that our craft as designers is founded on these superpowers that are innately human and irreplaceable by technology. As such, we believe that we stand to gain significantly by combining our human superpowers with computing cognition to achieve infinite possibilities thus elevating our value to a much higher purpose in the world.” 

You can watch the action here below:

2 – Positioning computational designers in your business: 4 things to consider. We came across this series of articles from Nathan Miller of Proving Ground via a newsletter from Building Design + Construction. Miller starts by making the point that there is little industry consensus about what a “computational designer” position actually is. He provides guidance, which is useful for any architect in a leadership role trying to figure out if adding this title or role in their firm is of value.  (BD+C)

What’s the skinny?  Computational design is not a technical role, Computational design is not equal to BIM. Computational design is not for everyone! Computational design equals solutions. This is an interesting high-level read of the issues around this role. 

3 – Meet JAILBOT, Hilti’s new construction robot. Construction industry toolmaker Hilti has introduced a new robot for construction, specifically for MEP work. The robot is a complete, self-contained, software, and hardware system that works semi-autonomously. It specifically is good at the layout and drilling of holes on the underside of floors above for anchoring suspended systems like HVAC ductwork, wire management trays, and suspended ceilings.  (BD+C)

Another specific-task construction robot, this one from Hilti. JAILBOT drills holes in ceiling situations like this one pictured, speeding up the work, increasing accuracy, and human safety. (Image: screengrab, YouTube video.)

Why is this important?   These systems require 3D spatial data in order to work, placing the emphasis on the usefulness of BIM models and their data in the overall AEC workflow process. The robot can drill with greater speed, accuracy, and safety, allowing human labor on the job site to focus their efforts on other tasks. JAILBOT works after data has been uploaded from Autodesk Revit or AutoCAD files to the Hilti Cloud. The robot comes with a rugged field tablet—which appears to be a tiny tablet running Microsoft Windows.  Watch the video of this robot here.

4 –  Meet the world’s newest architects: algorithms. This article from the World Economic Forum (WEF) brings to the attention of its global intellectual audience, the changing state of design in the field of architecture.  (WEF)

What matters?   This article from summer actually does a decent overview of the role algorithms-aided design (AAD) technology is playing in the field. It doesn’t get into tools but has some interesting links, such as this one on Introduction to Ant colony optimization (ACO). 

5 –  Biomimicry enables architects to make a “positive impact” on the environment…  says Exploration Architecture founder Michael Pawlyn.  (Dezeen)

Architect Michael Pawlyn holding up a segment of architecture inspired by biomimicry. (Image: screengrab, YouTube video.)

What is biomimicry?  Biomimicry is innovation inspired by nature. It involves looking at nature to understand how things work and can inspire architects and engineers to design more efficiently using morphological formations more similar to what we find in such things as trees, plants, and shells.

6.  Covid-19 challenges New York’s future.   This excellent article over at the Economist (from June) discusses how Covid-19 has impacted New York City. A quote: “By night, Manhattan holds 1.6m souls, a large number for a small island. In the morning over twice as many more rush in like a tide, filling up office blocks, coffee shops and spin classes. In the evening this tide drains back out over bridges and through tunnels, leaving just a thin residue of small-hours stop-outs and shift workers. The ebb and flow is shallower at weekends and in summer. But it has held its rhythm for more than a century.”  (Economist)

Edward Glaeser’s charting of wealth (per cap income) as it relates to density. Urban density increases human production efficiency which leads to higher GDP for denser places to live. In effect, cities are functioning like microprocessors. (see analysis below).

What impact did Covid have?  By mid-march, the ebb and flow of people coming into New York City stopped. So instead of a daily rush of 1.6m + additional souls coming into the city every day, practically zero new souls came into the city during the day. What an impact change. New York City generates USD 1.8 trillion GDP every year. Edward Glaeser, an economist at Harvard University, has shown that urban density is good for the planet. It decreases our carbon footprint while increasing workers’ productivity. So cities are like highly efficient microprocessors. Like microchips, the tighter you get people together the faster they can make “production” of all sorts happen, and with less energy. 

7 – Digital Twins to play a bigger role in post-pandemic construction.  Digital twin technologies will make it possible for building owners to design and build for maximum social distancing and various scenarios.  (Construction Dive)

How?  A digital twin is more than just a BIM model. It includes all kinds of data about how a building is used, what times people fill the spaces inside, how packed spaces get, what rooms are used and which ones are not, how humans fill circulation paths, etc. Pedestrian traffic simulation software like Bentley’s LEGION is one such solution solving for social distancing as a criterion now in the age of Covid-19.

8 – New School of Design degree focuses on using robotics in architecture.  One of the US’s top colleges for design, Penn’s Stuart Weitzman School of Design will offer a new master’s degree (started this fall) called Master of Science in Design: Robotics and Autonomous Systems (MSD-RAS).  (Daily Pennsylvanian)

Why it matters? Penn’s new program will be one of the few architecture programs in the United States that use robots and artificial intelligence in design. The master’s degree requires ten courses and can be completed in nine months. 

9. An Overview of Digital Fabrication in Architecture.  This article from last month at ArchDaily captures some of the content we have brought to Xpresso many months ago, but it is worth bringing up because this article is a deep dive into the topic of digital fabrication in architecture, in general. (ArchDaily)

Why it matters? This article covers the various “areas” of digital fabrication in architecture. From Additive Manufacturing to Subtractive Manufacturing, to Automated Construction Processes, etc, this article gives a snapshot of each area. 

10 – Humanity is stuck in short-term thinking. Here’s how we escape.  Here is a quote from this excellent article by Richard Fisher:  “Just as children expand their temporal perceptions as they age, so too has our species over millennia. Like toddlers, our pre-human ancestors had no sense of a distant future. They lived only in the present. Humanity’s trajectory from tool-wielding hominins to the architects of grand metropolises has been interwoven with our ever-expanding sense of time. Unlike other animals, we have minds capable of imagining a deep future, and we can conceive the daunting truth that our lifetime is a mere flash in an unfathomable chronology.  (Technology Review)

Why is it difficult to escape?  Fisher explains that part of our 21st-century ills is this very dangerous short-termism—driven by a world saturated in media across all kinds of screens, the dailyness of social media, and the difficulty of getting beyond our next news cycle. He argues we have become stuck in the “now.” Is this why, perhaps, American put a reality TV star into the White House, because he was the right person to keep them focused on the day, the now, rather than on looking and building for the future? 

This short-terminism is taking our eye off the necessity of taking care of our planet and its precious resources…off making the necessary changes to address long-term human sustainability. We have become the antithesis of the medieval builders of cathedrals, those often lauded for their long-term thinking for creating structures that would last centuries and generations far beyond them. 

Curated content: Emerging Technologies and their potential impact on CAD-based industries

Siemens and Parasolid: Apple Sillicon

In the last issue, we said we had something special coming up that delved into Apple Silicon-based Macs (ARM Macs) and the CAD markets. Just about three weeks ago when we took that article to the company from which the interview came, they said something had changed between the months when we last spoke and now and that we could not publish it. Instead, they said, “hold off another two weeks and things will become more clear.” In fact, they wanted us to come back in two weeks and do another interview because they had new news.

A week later, Apple announced its “One more thing” event.

I won’t say any more about that particular unnamed company but another part of our planned Special Feature for this issue of Xpresso was our discussions with Seimens about Parasolid and Apple Silicon. What follows below are some highlights from my discussion in the summer with Phil Nanson, Manager, Parasolid Components, Siemens PLM Software, where he is located in Cambridge, United Kingdom.

We had an extensive discussion. We will just jump into some of it below:

(Xpresso) What was it like in terms of investment time to build out Parasolids for Apple’s iOS platform and how might that relate to the effort to transition support for Parasolid for macOS on Apple Silicon?

(Phil Nanson, Siemens) iOS was a harder port but not our hardest. Most of our challenges were in testing rather than getting Parasolid to run. Obviously, supporting so many customers we do a lot of automated testing. Currently, we are running 90,000 tests a night on the iOS platform. We run about 4 million tests a night across all platforms and builds. Getting all that infrastructure to work in the very different environment of a tablet where there is a whole different set of assumptions to the usage model and productivity…that’s where the main cost was.

So infrastructure we could then reuse very easily when it came to supporting Android because a lot of the problems are the same. And I would expect Apple’s ARM Macs would be easier, one that that is more likely to follow the paradigms of a desktop.

Further Analysis & Commentary: So the challenges for the modeling kernel on other operating systems aren’t just about differences among chip architectures but very much also about how devices are used and how that impacts usage models at the point of interface with software. This impacts testing infrastructure. Apple ARM-Macs will be used like all Macs today are used. We don’t see Apple making their new Macs hybrids with touch screen interfaces. Such a move makes them iPads. Instead, we see the Touch Bar and the touch-based functions of the Track-Pad as being the only areas where new challenges for the Parasolid modeling kernel may come up. 

So at this point, you have completely supported Parasolid on other ARM-based platforms? 

Yes. They are supported on Apple’s iOS and Google Android.

Those 90,000 tests per night on iOS, do they include actually testing CAD applications as part of your tests? 

Our general tests include CAD applications. We don’t do that on iOS but we do it on Linux and platforms with heavy service. Our standard tests include all the project tests we’ve written. And we are normally testing all the PRs anyone’s ever submitted to us. We try to have a combination of testing the things that are developed in QA and testing anything anyone has ever found as an issue.

Further Analysis & Commentary: We can safely assume iOS developers doing CAD/3D pro apps have submitted issues and these are being tested regularly as part of standard tests. 

(Xpresso) Apple offered developers the opportunity to acquire ARM-based Macs in the form of Mac minis for testing. Is Parasolid in possession of one of those machines? 

(Phil Nanson, Siemens) We are expecting to be in possession soon. (Editor’s note. this was back in July when we spoke.)

When you did your iOS version of Parasolid, what was the general duration of time to port Parasolid? 

I think it took us 6-9 months. That was one of our harder ports because of the infrastructure changes.

If it took you the same time with Macs on Apple Silicon, it would probably put you in a really good position. 

We are targeting the point of production, early next year.

Tim Millet, VP Platform Architecture, Apple, inside an Apple Lab focused on Apple Silicon. (Image: screengrab from Apple Event in September)

Do you have any sense of the CAD industry, in general, moving to ARM architecture platforms? You have said you see a greater interest in tablets. Do you also see a greater interest in CAD in the data center, where people can access these machines through virtual desktops? 

I believe it will be completely driven by performance and price. The effect of that transition will make people much more agnostic because the machines won’t be sitting in front of them. People are more likely to switch more quickly and dramatically than when they have to invest in the hardware. So it definitely increases the likelihood people will switch.

Further Analysis & Commentary: On this last question, what I am driving at is will ARM-based workstations (remember Apple’s Mac Pro will likely be the first) placed in the cloud enable greater switching between platforms?  If ‘CAD tool A’ is new and written for Apple Silicon Macs and a user is considering it, would it be easier to consider switching if it was available in cloud computing form? Phil is making the point, which I agree with, that depending on cost and performance, if they don’t have to invest in the hardware it can definitely increase their likelihood of switching. One hopes then that Apple fully supports its new ARM-based Macs to be used in data centers for robust support for virtualized application serving. This can enable fluidity in the software market giving developers more incentive to enable ways for potential customers to try their new apps. 

A SketchUp Killer? Meet Snaptrude from India

Architosh was recently contacted by a new company out of India. Meet, Snaptrude.

Snaptrude is a cloud-based concept design tool that aims to close the gap between design phase work and BIM phase work. Quoting their website, “With Snaptrude Architects can literally squeeze the mundane manual tasks of hours into a few minutes on a single  platform on the cloud.”

The company is very new and we hope to go through a demo with the company’s CEO, Altaf Ganihar very soon. Ganihar is a mathematics genius and realized the problems architects were facing while a young scholar working in the field of computer graphics and machine learning in 2014. He was surprised to learn how real architects and designers actually work, how fragmented and tedious the existing design process actually is.

Snaptrude is cloud-based and can run on multiple device types as shown here in this image. (Image: screengrab: Snaptrude.com)

The goal of Snaptrude is to change this, to introduce new technologies that allow for seamlessness in the design process.

Further Analysis & Commentary: On the surface—and again we have yet to actually engage with this new tool—Snaptrude looks similar to SketchUp in its web version, but clearly there is much more going on here from the visuals seen on the company’s website. What is enchanting about its main graphics is that the design process begins with a napkin sketch, then a photo of the napkin sketch, then it finds its way in Snaptrude from where the design process accelerates from rough concept modeling to the beginnings of a 3D architectural model with wall thicknesses and openings and then furniture and data appear. 

Evan Troxel Talk: 

Architect Evan Troxel, of the TRXL Podcast, which focuses on how technology is changing the architectural profession, has released a video recorded talk he gave at HMC Architects, of Ontario, California. This has actually been up since March of this year but I wanted to bring this to your attention because it fits squarely on the emerging technologies (emTech) focus of the Xpresso newsletter.

Architect Evan Troxel, Director of Digital Practice, HMC Architects, and creator and host of the podcast TXRL presenting a talk on disruption in Architecture. (Image: screengrab)

The topic of his talk is “Disruption.” Really about how technology is disrupting the field AEC fields and in this case how technology can disrupt the field and profession of architecture.

Architect Evan Troxel, Director of Digital Practice, HMC Architects, and creator and host of the podcast TXRL presenting a talk on disruption in Architecture. (Image: screengrab)

Evan goes over what defines technology “disruption” using Clayton Christensen’s definition from his book “The Innovator’s Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Firms to Fail (Management of Innovation and Change).” Evan also mentions “The Future of the Professions: How Technology Will Transform the Work of Human Experts,” by Richard and Daniel Susskind. These are both books I have read and worth re-reading, in fact, and Evan does a great job of going through examples of disruption and looking at a range of newcomers in AEC that could be disruptive. To watch his talk go here and check out the video on YouTube. 

You can learn more about Evan and hear his superb podcast series, TRXL. here.

Issue Index

I have mentioned the following companies and solutions in this issue (see above):

Bentley OpenBuildings Designer

Gensler Blox

Hilti JAILBOT 

Penn Master of Science in Design: Robotics and Autonomous Systems (MSD-RAS)

Parasolid

Apple Silicon (M1)

Snaptrude

The Innovator’s Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Firms to Fail

The Future of the Professions

Closing Notes

We are still working on our introduction of version 1.0 of our Xpresso Reader Glossary and Index. It turned out to be a big project. It will make a nice seasonal Holiday Gift!

What did Architosh INSIDER members Get?

Member Access—(emTech) Section Plus articles like this one provide architosh INSIDER annual subscribers with more of the content in the (emTech) section of our free monthly newsletter. While this article above features much of the latest issue of Xpresso (#21), there are more and deeper Further Analysis and Commentary sections, more inline videos, and an issue index with links—just for annual INSIDER member subscribers like you.

In addition, the Top Ten Must Reads actually feature 10 curated stories with our commentary and analysis of why we selected them. In Xpresso, only five are provided.

Member Access articles are a premium bonus to annual subscribers that add to the “unlimited site access” nature of your subscription. Thanks for subscribing!

The post Member Access — (emTech) Section Plus for Xpresso #21 appeared first on Architosh.

We are shifting gears as readers tell us they would prefer more of our emerging technologies (emTech) content, not “earlier access.”

From now on our previously titled “Early Access (emTech) Section for INSIDER Xpresso” reports will be called “Member Access—(emTech) Section Plus.” Each issue will arrive on or around the same day as that month’s Xpresso newsletter. Xpresso 19 came out three days ago, for example.

(emTech) Section Plus is about providing “more” content on emerging technologies—the primary topic of the Xpresso newsletter. This deeper version of (emTech) is provided exclusively for annual subscribers of architosh INSIDER Membership.

Special Feature

We published a special feature in Xpresso 19 titled, Zach Soflin Talks to Architosh About Layer App. 

THERE IS A VERY GOOD CHANCE a lot of Xpresso readers have not heard of the Layer App. Born out of the mid-west from within an architecture firm (BVH Architecture) and generated to tackle the needs of an extensive rehabilitation project to Bertram Goodhue’s icon Nebraska State Capitol, Layer as first seen at AIA was a striking example both good “mobile-first” software design but also excellence in integration-oriented design.

In our Curated emTech section below we continue in-depth about the importance of software integration as it relates to BIM (Building Information Modeling), but Layer too is itself born out of this recognition that interoperability—at the granular level of data—is vastly more important than interoperability of file types.

In our discussion with Soflin, who is a licensed architect, we delve into the Layer App and why it is a key new application in AECO.

Layer — What It Does

Layer is an application that addresses the needs of managing the profound amounts of data (information) typical of most building projects. While the Layer App began from the side of “design” in the design-build-operate model, Soflin and his team saw early interest from both “build” and “operate” professionals.

Layer is a completely flexible and customizable project management application that is built for use in the field, the job site trailer, and the office. “A lot of our overall vision for what the platform can provide is aimed at beyond the design professional,” says Soflin. “Layer is a platform for the entire building lifecycle.”

To read the full story, click here to Xpresso 19. You can subscribe to Xpresso here, it’s free!

The Top Ten Must-Reads

I’ve combed the Internet to find the most interesting, compelling, or controversial stories about the AEC and manufacturing industries, and the social and emerging technological forces at play on both:

1 – Artificial Intelligence Can Improve Process Management in Construction, is the title of this Forbes piece by David A. Teich, featuring the mention of Buildots, a company working to use computer vision to compare a construction site to the plans (or more correctly BIM models) of a future building. felt.  (Forbes)

What’s new about this?  We have seen robots fitted with cameras collecting and streaming video to AI-instilled software to analyze a construction site to a BIM model and data. What’s new here is that the camera is construction helmet-mounted. It takes video at 2-fps. It doesn’t need a smooth video; it uses just lots of images. And like other systems, they are feed to AI-based software to inspect and compare.

2 – Katerra sheds 400 more employees. The fourth round of staff cuts at construction unicorn Katerra leads to 7 percent of its workforce getting pink-slipped. This follows the replacement of founding CEO Michael Marks with Paul Kibsgaard, instituted by SoftBank which has invested USD 1.4 billion in Katerra. (Silicon Valley Bus Journal)

Katerra goes through more staff changes but the SoftBank-based company is North America’s largest mass timber producer and the only company offering end-to-end mass timber design, manufacturing, and construction. (Image: Katerra)

What’s the low-down?  SoftBank has invested a ton of money in this construction unicorn and recent changes are driven at accelerating a path to profitability. This report notes that Katerra has 6,000 multifamily units under construction and other recent reports note that the Menlo Park-based company (valued at USD 4 billion) North America’s largest mass timber producer, offering end-to-end mass timber design, manufacturing, and construction. This makes it a pivotal green economy new company in the AECO space. 

3 – Computational design helps deliver Australia’s largest sustainable tower. This piece in BIM Today discusses 6-8 Parramatta Square, part of one of the biggest sustainable urban projects in Australia. Designed by Johnson Pilton Walker (JPW), these stunning new towers use Bentley’s GenerativeComponents (GC) technology inside Bentley OpenBuilding Designer BIM software.  (BIM Today)

A street-level rendered view of 6 & 8 Parramatta Square, designed by award-winning Australian architecture firm Johnson Pilton Walker (JPW). (Image: JPW / Architosh. All rights reserved.)

What is valuable in this story?   The important piece about 6-8 Parramatta is the unique use of computational design to solve problems for the architects and their consultants and the general contractor in the later stages of the project. Usually, we see AAD (algorithms-aided design) technology deployed in the design stage. Architosh recognized the unique aspects of this Bentley Year-in-Infrastructure Award-Winning project last year and wrote an in-depth feature here. 

4 –  ETH Zurich Researchers Develop Novel DFAM Framework for Multi-Flow Nozzle Designs  Unique research work coming out of ETH Zurich has implications for the world of 3D printing or computational design for additive manufacturing (DfAM).  The work focuses on a computational design framework for FDM nozzles.  (3DPI)

What’s new about this?  This research is essentially saying that complex parts require complex tools, in this case, more complex 3D printing nozzles. For those interested in 3D printing or DfAM this is a must-read. The article also links to similar research at other universities, including Harvard. 

5 – Parametric design: style and substance?  Computational design is not “wacky” form-finding, begins this article by Ben Knight writing for the newsroom at UNSW in Sydney, Australia. Knight is writing about the importance of “parametricism” as championed by principal architect Patrick Schumacher of Zaha Hadid Architects. This article is ultimately an argument for parametricism not as form-finding but solving more critical issues in architecture. (UNSW)

Computational design was used for this project that solved for optimal floor plan configuration to best enable efficiencies. This had little to do with the parametricism used strickly for form-finding and everything to do with building performance against a measurable and understood metric.

A sign of the future?  Quoting UNSW associate professor M. Hank Haeusler, “for us, the engagement with computational methods and tools isn’t to change the way the architecture looks, as a new parametric design style.” He says they are teaching computational design methods to solve the grand problems facing architects.

6 – Architecture graduate student recognized with computational design award.

Özgüç Çapunaman, a doctoral candidate in the Stuckeman School’s Department of Architecture, has been recognized for his research by the Association for Computer-Aided Architectural Design Research in Asia (CAADRIA) as the recipient of the Young CAADRIA Award. His research centers on interactive digital fabrication, programmable composites, computational making, and architectural tool development.  (Archinect)

One to watch because!  Çapunaman’s paper submission focuses on interactive digital fabrication workflow. His research, which he began to establish during his time at Carnegie Mellon University, aims to question the human relationship with digital fabrication tools that are used in the field, such as CAM and CAD. 

“The paper presents an interactive and adaptive design-fabrication workflow where the user can actively take turns in the fabrication process,” Çapunaman wrote in his abstract. “The proposed experimental setup utilizes paste extrusion additive manufacturing in tandem with real-time control of an industrial robotic arm. By incorporating a computer-vision based feedback loop, it captures momentary changes in the fabricated artifact introduced by the users to inform the digital representation.”

7 – The Secret of AI is People. 

Too many business leaders still believe that AI is just another ‘plug and play’ incremental technological investment. In reality, gaining a competitive advantage through AI requires organizational transformation of the kind exemplified by companies leading in this era: Google, Haier, Apple, Zappos, and Siemens. These companies don’t just have better technology — they have transformed the way they do business so that human resources can be augmented with machine powers. (Harvard Business Review)

Why is this story important?  A multistage five-year study looked at five leading organizations and what brought them success with AI. The big take-away is counter-intuitive—it’s not about bein technology-driven or tech-forward. The secret is making the businesses model transformations so that automation augments humans and vice versa. Human skills matter—creativity, care, intuition, adaptability, and innovation are areas machines cannot match humans. To read how leaders get the most out of AI putting humans into the equation for maximum success, read here. 

8 – Builder a Better Machine for an AI World.  Raja Koduri has been in the thick of the past two eras of computing, which were marked by – among other things – the ability to architect systems and software that helped to get more performance into the hands into increasing numbers of people. From leadership stints at AMD (twice), Apple, and now Intel, he is currently Intel chief architect, vice president, and general manager of the Cores and Visual Computing and Edge Computing Solutions unit at Intel.  (The Next Platform)

Why is this story important?  Raja describes how we went from 1 billion PCs in the era of the personal computer and Internet to 10 billion devices in the mobile plus cloud era, and now we are moving toward the 100 connected devices, with IoT and AI and the need for exascale computing. “All of this represents a 10-fold opportunity for the IT industry, but it’s going to demand massive amounts of expensive compute power, a demand that already is doubling every three to four months, Koduri said. By 2025, the world will be creating 175 zettabytes of data.” 

9 – Apple Silicon Macs—chip production on schedule.  Chip production for the first Apple Silicon Macs is reported to be on schedule for launch before the end of the year.   (9to5 Mac)

The new ARM Macs will be based on an Apple chip architected around the specific needs of each Mac device—from mobiles to the Mac Pro.

What Macs will get Apple Silicon First?  Apple will be delivering 5nm SoC (system on a chip) processors for its next-gen Macs in the 4th quarter of 2020, according to reports. 5nm is vastly smaller than the 14 and 10nm processors from Intel, and will thus enable Apple significant advantages to pack tremendous compute power inside its svelt form-factors. While there are conflicting reports of a 12-in MacBook versus a new iMac and a new MacBook Pro being first to obtain Apple Silicon, either way this is an important inflection point in the computer industry. 

10  – The Dusty Robotics CEO Tessa Lau Discusses Robotics Start-Ups and Autonomous Robots for Construction.  Tessa Lau is Founder/CEO at Dusty Robotics, whose mission is to increase construction industry productivity by introducing robotic automation on the jobsite. Dusty’s FieldPrinter autonomous mobile robots prints layout plans directly onto the floors of job sites using information from building information models (BIM) as a guide.  (Robotics Business Review)

The importance of Robots in AEC. Having a robot print out the floor plan on the concrete deck of a building is a non-obvious win-win for AEC. It’s a task that gets done with people and transits and tape measures. But Tessa Lau’s robot ingests BIM documents and with that data in-hand can play a significant role in augmenting human tasks on the job site. Read on to learn more about their USD 5 million seed round. 

Curated content: Emerging Technologies and their potential impact on CAD-based industries

The Future of BIM Interop:

Recently, after we published our first article on the Revit Open Letter by a group of British architects, I was contacted by the folks at 3D Repo, in the UK. Dr. Jozef Dobos, CEO of 3D Repo initially wrote in to discuss his views on the Revit Open Letter movement. He also, however, shared his views on the future of interoperability (interop) in the AECO industry.

AEC Delta Project

Dr. Dobos chimed in on the Revit Open Letter partly because he felt the AECO industry is at an important inflection point in its digital tools history. Being that better “interoperability” was one of the main sticking points in the open letter he wanted to introduce to Architosh his company’s work on an open-source technology his company helped create and shared and is known in the industry as the AEC Delta project.

A lead slide image from the Dr. Al Fisher presentation on the AEC Delta project. (Image: Buro Happold)

The AEC Delta project, in a nutshell, is an API technology project that enables applications to talk to each other and exchange data, including BIM applications. Some of the technology is embedded inside 3D Repo’s namesake web application focused on the AECO industry.

Dr. Dobos explained that AEC Delta is a collaboration between several companies in the UK that began in 2019. The notable engineering firm Buro Happold is one of those companies. As part of the Innovate UK-funded project, Dr. Al Fisher of Buro Happold goes through what AEC Delta is all about in this recorded event (here on YouTube), noting that AEC Delta, as a funded project, included partners Buro Happold, UCL, Rhomberg Sersa (Rail Group), and 3D Repo. Additional partners include HOK, Georgia Tech, ARUP, Hypar, SNC Lavalin, and Atkins.

The project has three project deliverables, including an Open Delta specification, an open REST API specification, and open-source reference implementations.

Dr. Fisher discussing the limitations of how we share information today in the AEC BIM world.

The specific problem being addressed is how we share information in the AEC BIM industry. Today we share entire models (files we pass back and forth) but in the future, we will share only the data that has changed in models (deltas). (see the images above and below.)

Another view showing how “information” would be shared using a modern “diffing” process where software solutions pass along only the changes or “deltas” between systems which would be connected via APIs and talk to each other in often real-time methods.

The current method is just as inefficient as in the world of changing 2D drawing files, to some extend. Both methods create large payloads, create problems for tracking changes, and are inefficient. AEC Delta project technology wants to be “transactional” not on a “file basis” but on a “diff” (diffing) basis. The term “diffing” comes from the GitHub world and it relates to how modern software is developed across geography and time.

Rhino and Grasshopper are talking to 3D Repo and Speckle Works applications using this new AEC Delta open-source technology using Buro Happold’s HBoM (life adapter) that passes data across the applications shown above. Watch the video here.

Dr. Al Fisher shows in his talk early work at Buro Happold linking in their internal code (a plugin inside Rhino+GH) based on AEC Delta open-source specifications connecting to Speckle Works and 3D Repo. You can see all three applications updating each other using this new open-source AEC Delta technology at 11:13 in the video here. One has to admit this technology is cool and exciting!

You can see Buro Happold’s contribution to this project here at The Buildings and Habitats object model (BHoM) web page.

Further Analysis and Commentary:  Here I would like to point out that one factor helping drive the push for software in AEC that is less file-dependent for interoperability (interop) is the general push for applications in the cloud. If you noticed, one of the company’s listed in the Dr. Fisher seminar was Hypar. Hypar is entirely cloud-driven and you operate it in your browser. It can ingest files and output files but the large point is it represents the types of AECO industry tools that represent the future. It is not surprising to see them get involved in the AEC Delta project. 

ASITE and 3D Repo

The folks at 3D Repo are very serious about the future of BIM/AEC interop. As one of the partners in the AEC Delta project, they have developed their own Diff technology and APIs to pass data back and forth to other applications. Dr. Jozef Dobos shared with me several webinar recordings that have taken place in the recent past. One of those was a webinar with ASITE and 3D Repo focused on custom integrations using each other’s respective APIs.

As explained in the webinar (which you can watch here, in full) ASITE sees themselves as “primarily in the business of holding data.” And of providing that data to other software systems for use.

ASITE features “workflows” which are fully customizable and can involve third-party applications via API integrations. In this particular webinar, the focus was on the integration between ASITE and 3D Repo. To build automation between these two platforms “trigger” events are built into each application (into specific workflows in ASITE, for example).

ASITE’s Take on Software Evolution

One of the more fascinating moments in this webinar recording was the discussion about the history of software. Traditionally, when new and successful software enters the market it offers a “unique selling point” (USP). Essentially, the entire software product builds features around its USP known as its core functionality (CF). (see the diagram below.)

Rob Clifton, senior VP, ASITE, explains during this talk about how software has existed in the past (left in the diagram above) and how the present and future are shaping up. Successful software begins with a USP (unique selling point). Core functionality wraps the USP, but wider features add functionality that is not intrinsic to the USP and often overlap with competitor products. (wider functionality is outside core functionality and therefore does not deepen the USP.

When software expands its feature set it moves further away from its USP. This has two often undesired consequences. A widening of features places the software application in an ever-widening overlap with competitor software, while also diminishing focus and resources on the USP.

Tech giants try to cover everything. Because they offer “connected platforms” there is an advantage in their tools working together. (think Microsoft, Adobe, and Autodesk, as examples). But this diversity and wide breadth of coverage tend to take away from focusing on their core areas of expertise and their USPs. The giants focus on tie-ins in their suites and platforms selling the virtue of strong connections and interop via “the platform.” (eg: Microsoft leveraging its OS with its own web browser — see the left side of the diagram below).

In the past, the value of software was placed on the strength of the USP. The strength of connections was often based on the software being connected by a platform under one company. But today’s market is shaping up differently. Through API integrations, unique USPs from diverse software solutions can be connected to each other—not by virtue of a single platform under a single company but—via APIs built on solid and open technologies freely available to all.

ASITE says the focus today in software is building out technologies that enable great connections between tools that are owned by separate companies and our outside major platforms, offering the advantages of connected data without the disadvantages of “legacy-oriented” file-based interop limitations. This is precisely what Zach Soflin, founder of Layer App, is talking about in the special feature above.

The advantage is you get better coverage of your business’ requirements (being able to use best-of-breed tools together via API connections) but also gain the advantage of setting up your solutions in a much more personalized way than one can do with limiting yourself to collections of tools in single company platforms.

By leveraging a diverse set of USPs (multiple best-in-breed tools) and building out custom workflows via API integrations, companies to tailor digital solutions to their specific needs at ever more personalized and effective levels.

Rob Clifton, senior vice president of ASITE puts it this way: “…it is important when you are selecting software to work with that it is apart of this larger network of integrations. Software that sits out on its own and integrates poorly does not offer you the same potential and capacity going forward and is not as future-proof as those that are really connected to this web of software solutions.” He draws the comparison to Apple’s iPhone and notes the phone is the platform but all the apps on it are customized to each person.

To watch this presentation in full go here. 

Further Analysis and Commentary:  In watching the ASITE and 3D Repo presentation the ASITE folks did note that to the uninitiated, setting up custom workflows in ASITE takes some training and experience. But it does not take any programming experience. This is a no-code / low-code environment.

In general, the larger point is that building custom workflows are worth it. One example showed the integration of SafetiBase with 3D Repo. “Pins” for the location of safety issues noticed in the field could be automatically located back in 3D Repo in the BIM model view. Likewise, another example showed how to add a barcode reader field to a custom tool built with Microsoft’s Power Automate and Power Apps and have that data passed back to 3D Repo automatically upon scanning an item in the field.

Further 3D Repo Discussions

Dr. Jozef Dobos keyed us into several 3D Repo webinars that are recorded that cover other integrations and just 3D Repo in general. 

For example, there is a case study on 3D Repo and SafetiBase, which is an app focused on job site safety management. This is a PAS 1192-6 compliant risk register and database solution. More on this use of 3D Repo and SafetiBase can be found here. 

A webinar featuring the use of 3D Repo and SafetiBase used together in an integrated way.

For the Hinkley Point C project in the UK, 3D Repo’s patent-pending 3D Diff change detection tool is discussed in detail. This is another interesting case study of cloud-based AECO tools talking to each other in an intelligent integrated workflow offering great advantages over the limitations of passing BIM files around the AECO world of stakeholders. 

Another 3D Repo case study worth looking at is this one on the Canary Wharf Wood Wharf project. And finally, this case study looks at PlanBase and 3D Repo for a planning portal for the Greater London Authority and London’s Mayor’s Office. 

Digital Tools for Building Integrations

Tools for helping users build-out “integrations” between software systems are growing and the ASITE and 3D Repo webinar listed several. While ASITE’s webinar touted the virtues of Microsoft’s Power Automate (formerly Flow), competitors include all of the following:

• boomi — their tagline is “instantly connect everything to everything.” 
• MuleSoft — this tool offering seems like Zapier for enterprises, in other words, connecting more enterprise software solutions together rather than consumer/prosumer oriented tool offerings. 
• Zapier — a mainstay in the integrations game, Zapier is aimed at small to medium enterprises (SME) and we at Architosh already have good experiences with Zapier for several automations used for both Architosh and for AEC projects. 
• Node-RED — this is a low-code programming tool. 
• Power Automate (Flow) — this is Microsoft’s tool now and was used in the ASITE to 3D Repo integrations seen in the webinar discussed (video here). 

One could search the web for even more integration offerings. Some of these solutions have traction in the AEC space due to their early lead in the integrations market. For example, Zapier has integrations with Procore where you can receive a digest email from Procore’s RFIs. You can also set up Zapier to send you an SMS text message when a new RFI is created in Procore. Procore itself has an App Marketplace dedicated to integrations that exist while its published APIs enable folks (both software companies and end-users with software skills) to build new integrations. After all, this is the future folks! 

Zapier even let’s site visitors select a professional role (eg: Project Manager—which is appropriate for AECO folks) and it will list out what they call Zap Templates that match a selection of your apps and how Zapier has pre-existing integrations. See this page to start. 

As noted above, another aspect noted in the webinar was using 3D Repo as a hub and looking at how to connect to various AEC workflows and it with Microsoft PowerApps.  This tool, too, has competitive offerings but it was PowerApps shown in the webinar. 

• Retool — connect to most databases and anything with a REST, GraphQL, or gRCP API. 
• Betty Blocks — this offering is all about how humans with ideas are the future, not systems. They have a tagline that says, “By 2023, anyone can build an application.”
• JotForm — which was used in the 3D Repo webinar. It’s an easy-to-use online form builder.
• Amazon Honeycode — another Betty Blocks competitor by the Amazon giant! No programming needed to build bespoke apps for your workflows. 
• PowerApps — Low-code solution by Microsoft. 

The Revit Open Letter

An Update

Over the past few weeks, I have had the opportunity to speak more with lain Godwin, the AEC industry veteran and IT consultant who has helped co-ordinate the Revit Open Letter initiated in Great Britain. I also had the opportunity to interview Autodesk CEO, Andrew Anagnost. Let’s start with the update from Godwin.

The ‘Letters to Autodesk” website went up in August to expedite the ability for firms to sign the letter. From my latest conversation with Godwin, the total signatories are now nearly 200 firms around the globe, in total with a significant number who signed anonymously. I understand from both Godwin and Anagnost that Anagnost and a small Autodesk team held a virtual meeting with the original British group of signatories. Anagnost on my call with him noted it was a productive call but that the contents of that call were confidential amongst the participants. Godwin was not a party to that meeting but did hear sentiment from the British firms who were attendees.

One of the issues that is a sore point with the signatories was apparently the group’s feelings about Anagnost’s defense of Revit software costs. Anagnost personally penned a blog post on Autodesk’s website addressing the British firms and the post had mixed reactions globally. In my call with Anagnost, he spent only a small amount of time addressing the licensing cost issue but I pushed hard to explain from an architect’s experience (in this case my three-plus decades as an architect) that not everyone who works in a CAD or BIM program does so every day or even every week. I suggested that if other software companies can implement “usage-based” licensing (named or otherwise) that Autodesk could also. Anagnost agreed and said that their users’ licensing issues will get addressed more fully in the near future. The named licensing model does not preclude the ability of Autodesk to implement licensing models based on usage.

Issue Index

I have mentioned the following companies and solutions in this issue (see above):

Buildots

Katerra

Johnson Pilton Walker (JPW)

Bentley GenerativeComponents

ETH Zurich

UNSW, Sydney, Australia

Dusty Robotics

AEC Delta Project

Buro Happold

ASITE

3D Repo

SafetiBase

Zapier

Procore

We listed several tools in the section above titled, Digital Tools for Building Integrations. 

Closing Notes

We planned to introduce version 1.0 of our Xpresso Reader Glossary and Index but we were unable to hit our deadline. So look forward to this next month for sure!

What did Architosh INSIDER members Get

Member Access—(emTech) Section Plus articles like this one provide architosh INSIDER annual subscribers with more of the content in our (emTech) section of our free monthly newsletter. While this article above features much of the latest issue of Xpresso (#19), all of the Further Analysis and Commentary sections, and all of the Architosh Blue text is bonus material just for this article—just for annual INSIDER member subscribers like you.

In addition, the Top Ten Must Reads actually feature 10 curated stories with our commentary and analysis of why we selected them. In Xpresso, only five our provided.

Member Access articles are a premium bonus to annual subscribers that add to the “unlimited site access” nature of your subscription. Thanks for subscribing!

The post Member Access — (emTech) Section Plus for Xpresso #19 appeared first on Architosh.

We are shifting gears as readers tell us they would prefer more of our emerging technologies (emTech) content, not “earlier access.”

From now on our previously titled “Early Access (emTech) Section for INSIDER Xpresso” reports will be called “Member Access—(emTech) Section Plus.” Each issue will arrive on or around the same day as that month’s Xpresso newsletter. Xpresso 17 came out yesterday, for example.

(emTech) Section Plus is about providing “more” content on emerging technologies—the primary topic of the Xpresso newsletter. This deeper version of (emTech) is provided exclusively for annual subscribers of INSIDER Membership.

Special Feature

We published a special feature in Xpresso 17 yesterday that is titled, Stamhuis Good Design Requires Speed—Generative Design in Revit Powers Company Growth. 

Achieving high volumes and lots of repeat customer work, Stamhuis—a leading retail builder in Europe—has evolved into a juggernaut of automated efficiency. They have built this process on Autodesk BIM and project management tools mixed with powerful customized Dynamo programming. 

THERE IS OFTEN THIS MISCONCEPTION that speed and design are at fundamental odds with each other—that the latter will always compromise the former. But why is that?

The meaning of Speed

One key reason is that good design requires the ingredient of time itself. For Stamhuis, they are learning how to gain back more time so their designers can take on more strategic work, by tapping the power of generative design through Dynamo. What the Netherlands-based company saves on time, they also give back to the project client. 

Stamhuis’s specialty is the design and build-out of liquor stores, convenience stores, and supermarkets. In this market, time is of the essence for their clients; when stores go through remodels, customers will temporarily shop elsewhere. It is critical that store renovations are back up and running before customers adopt substitutes permanently. So time—far from being the enemy of good design—in this case, is a vital ingredient in client success. 

The master Dynamo script establishes a sophisticated semi-automated design workflow within Autodesk Revit offering Stamhuis a massive speed-up in laying out retail stores for its many clients. The system utilizes the company’s very large Revit family of objects. (Image: Stamhuis)

Speed, in the case of Stamhuis’s accomplishments, is virtuous on two fronts. Faster project delivery helps clients with success, faster processes due to Dynamo utilization help Stamhuis designers take on more strategic work, ultimately benefitting the company and its clients. 

So how did they get there?

To read the rest of this story, click here to Xpresso 17. You can subscribe to Xpresso here.

The Top Ten Must-Reads

I’ve combed the Internet to find the most interesting, compelling, or controversial stories about the AEC and manufacturing industries, and the social and emerging technological forces at play on both:

1 – Surprising study: Urban density doesn’t cause more COVID-19 infections, even promotes lower death rates is the title of a new report published in late June. The research report contends that a potential mass exodus from dense cities may actually be a bad idea for everyone.  (Study Finds)

Why is this upside-down from common sense? The Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health study found that higher “infection rates” were not actually linked to higher densely populated places. Even more surprising, more densely populated areas have lower Covid-19 death rates. The full article and research report unpacks these surprising findings for you. One final quote: “These findings suggest that urban planners should continue to practice and advocate for compact places rather than sprawling ones, due to the myriad well-established benefits of the former, including health benefits,” says the lead author, Shima Hamidi, Ph.D.  The study was published in the Journal of the American Planning Association.

2 – Coronavirus Bringing Winter to the Drone Industry –  This interesting (Forbes) piece unwraps the surprising tale of how drones are doing a hero’s work during this pandemic, yet it is precisely the conditions of the pandemic that are now hurting the drone industry from taking off.

What’s the low-down? UPS and CVS are testing drones to carry prescription drugs to a Florida retirement community, and China is using drones to spray disinfectant in over 3 million square meters in Shenzhen. Yet, the pandemic has caused a cascade of bad financial and regulatory news for the nascent industry; test sites critical to the FAA’s crafting of rules for airspace have been closed, and venture capital issues are placing new pressures on the industry. 

3 – Six Epidemics from American History Show How Urban Design Affects Our Health This story published on Northeaster University’s website focuses on assistant professor of architecture, Sara Jensen Carr, and her upcoming book, The Topography of Wellness.  (Northeastern University)

Why this story matters today? Jensen Carr is definitely on topic. Her upcoming book chronicles six health crises throughout U.S. history and how those epidemics informed the design of cities. She writes that the gridded American cite became more important after the cholera outbreak when infected water pooled in crooked, unpaved streets. City officials wanted to get fresh water in and bad waste out of the city efficiently. “The net effect,” she writes, “is that we have straighter streets to accommodate long pipes underneath to move water and waste more safely.” 

Jensen Carr notes that the city was really thought of as an incubator of disease for much of American history. “That was especially true in the early 19th century when people believed in a theory called miasma, the idea that diseases floated aimlessly through the air and water.” 

4 –  AIA: Reopening America: Strategies for safer buildings  – I wanted to share this feature on the AIA’s website because it includes a set of dedicated articles focused on strategies for reopening up specific building types that are challenged by the current COVID-19 pandemic.  (AIA)

The AIA has published a series of reports with guidance on specific building types for strategically reopening America. (Image: AIA)

What’s essential here? Included are a series of highly illustrative and impactful strategic articles with plans and 3D illustrations (see above) for opening up (1) Offices, (2) Schools, (3) Retail Stores, (4) Senior Living Facilities, and finally (5) safer buildings in general. The AIA has also put together useful links on COVID-19 here.

5 – Analytics: Social Distancing in the workplace  – This story on Buro Happold’s website discusses how analytics and insight will help organizations implement social distancing in the workplace. (Buro Happold)

Buro Happold’s analytics group is using IoT sensors and monitoring real people in buildings to understand the hotspots for where social distancing breaks down or is difficult to achieve. This research tells us that the modern workplace is poorly configured for long-term social distancing futures and how to better design workspaces in the future. (Image: Buro Happold).

The emTech at Buro Happold: The highly regarded global engineering firm has tapped its analytics group using real data from IoT senses to feed 3D models powered by algorithms to understand where the modern workplace tends to struggle for social distancing. Red circles indicate a failure while green circles are a pass at maintaining consistent social distancing. The study illustrates that most current workspaces are not structured for long-term social distancing requirements, and also at what types of areas inside these space types tend to be the troubled spots.

Leading engineering and architecture firms with advanced computational design groups, like Buro Happold are conducting internal research to gain a lead on insights useful for current and future practice.

Five More Stories (just for INSIDER Members)

Xpresso readers saw the first five stories above, but annual subscribers to INSIDER Membership gain five more curated stories, plus a deeper (emTech) section (below) we are now calling “(emTech) Section Plus.”

6 – Sidewalk Labs plans to spin out more smart city companies – Last month Sidewalk Labs killed its Toronto smart city project, a project we have mentioned in the past in Xpresso. Privacy advocates railed against the Google subsidiary’s surveillance-capable smart city technologies.

What types of companies?  The skinny on this is that Sidewalk Labs has developed much expertise during its forays in Toronto that it is now able to bundle that expertise in discreet companies. For example, they are in the process of creating a mass timber construction company. Another possible company is focused on affordable electrification. (VentureBeat)

7 – COVID-19: Emerging technologies are now critical infrastructure — what that means for governance.  Emerging technologies (emTech) is what this post and the Xpresso newsletter is primarily focused on, insofar as their impacts on AEC and manufacturing industries. But instead of seeing emTech as being about technologies far off in the future in wide-spread application and usage, the COVID-19 pandemic revealed is that some emTech is vital for just such emergencies today! (WEForum)

What is essential to know? Things like chatbots are emerging technologies that during the massive loads of a pandemic, are coming to the rescue to relieve human workers. IoT and connectivity are showing societies how valuable these technologies are in a time of crisis. 

Countries like Estonia, which is technologically highly developed at both the implementation and policy level, are best prepared for the consequences of a pandemic. A quote: “The country already treats technology like critical infrastructure and could serve as an example for others to follow.” 

8 – The Biggest Robot Companies And Their Most Scary Inventions – This (Forbes) piece reviews some of the biggest robot companies in existence, but the reason I added this story here has to do with its references, in particular to Toyota’s THR-3 robot.

The THR-3 robot by Toyota can be remote-controlled by a human in a motion-capture suit. It is built for multiple roles, including construction, but a larger heavier stronger version could be much more useable in construction settings.

From scary robots to the incredibly useful: The THR-3 is one of the larger humanoid robots I’ve seen. What makes it unique is that it can be controlled by a human wearing a motion-detection (motion capture) suit. We’ve seen motion capture suits drive CGI characters in films, but this is the first time seeing it applied to a robot. One imagines remote workers in larger rooms using motion capture suits to drive the limbs of future THR-3s who are lifting incredibly heavy items on construction sites. Xpresso has already pointed out robots lifting heavy items on construction sites, but the agility and mobility of such equipment (some stay on tracks) is a hindrance to flexible operations. 

9 – Computation as Design: Ron Resch and the New Media of Geometry  –  Andrew Witt (former Director of Research at Gehry Technologies and co-founder of Certain Measures (Boston-Berlin), along with Eliza Pertigkiozoglou, currently Digital Design Consultant at Gehry Technologies, have both co-written an excellent paper on Ron Resch, a pioneer in computational geometry at the University of Utah back in the 1970s. (Harvard)

Who is this for? This is an offer for a deep read of one of the early pioneers of computational design, or what Witt has called one of the first “hackers” in AEC technologies. Resch was an artist, a polymath who did remarkable work foundational to many of today’s technologies. There is a link to the ePub book/paper on Resch, here.

10 – The Intricate Models Behind the RPBW (Renzo Piano Building Workshop) Method  – This story is more a find worthy of reading almost as a counterpoint to the focus of digital technology. It tells the story of model making at Renzo Piano Building Workshop. At RPBW model-making is seen as an essential part of the architectural method. (RPBW)

Interesting facts: model-making from the very start was important at Renzo Piano Building Workshop. Today the company has six full-time professional model-makers at workshops in Paris and Genoa. The article shows detailed photos of these workshops for model-making. Quote: “A bad line on a computer drawing might slip by unseen, but you can’t ‘cheat’ with models. It is only when you construct a model that you can truly see the things that don’t work.”

Computational Design Tool News

Rhino3DMedical is a version of Rhino 3D used for the orthopedics field. It was recently used for the first spine surgery in Brazil. The full story is on the Rhino3d blog here but in summary, Rhino3D Medical software enables 3D models from CT scans and can drive 3D printers to create very accurate medical models.

Rhino3DMedical is Rhino 3D technology for the orthopedic industry.

In the case of the Brazil spinal surgery, the patient had a surgical treatment called, microdiscectomy with transforaminal lumbar interbody fusion. Here’s a brief snippet from the story on Rhino3D blog:

“Soon after the completion of the MRI, we proceeded with the segmentation and 3D rendering of the spine (L3–S1), using Rhino3DMedical. The software is very intuitive to use and allows us to post-process 3D models in a fast and accurate way,” explains Dr. Sampaio.

Robots in Construction

Robot roundup: 5 recent innovations in construction tech – this ConstructionDive report runs through five robot products for the construction industry, including Husky A200, a new rover type of robot. GE Research is also developing a small tunneling robot. (ConstructionDive)

Contech – Prefabrication and Digital Design

Cover is a new Katerra-like construction company focused on home-building. Its founders are under 30 and featured in this Forbes article. Its innovative team members have built such things as automotive production lines, reusable rockets, race cars, and Gmail. Oh, and also $100 plus in modern mansions.

The company’s website says: “We started Cover to make thoughtfully designed and well-built homes for everyone. Homes that are uncompromising in their design and performance, and tailored to each person and property.”

An Instagram image of a Cover home. (Image: screengrab / Architosh.)

Cover is backed by some of the investors who have backed Tesla, SpaceX, Facebook, and Airbnb. Yet, while there is serious firepower behind Cover, just as there is behind Katerra, changing an industry that hasn’t moved much in a century or more isn’t easy. Despite this, the Los Angeles area company has raised $1.6 million in venture funding and can deliver a 400-sq foot pre-fab structure for $120,000 – $160,000, preferably in many cases to backyards where due to a housing shortage, new state regulations are easing the construction of residential units in the backyards of homes.

Architosh Analysis & Commentary: It was well over 12 years ago when I suggested Apple should eventually focus on the home market, bringing its aesthetics and ability to manufacture high-quality products to the market consistently. With software integrations added to the home, Apple could literally crush this market space. The Cover home innovative but its roofline is problematic from this architect’s perspective. Nothing that couldn’t be solved with a modular roof edge detail.

Other Design Market News

Global Interior Design Software Markets 2020 – 2025 expected to grow significantly. The global interior design software was valued at USD 3,829 million in 2019 and expected to reach USD 6,433 million by 2025. Driving growth in this market is improved productivity due to reducing dependency on paperwork and documentation and due to virtual walkthroughs and high-end renderings leading to client conversion and buy-in. (Full report here)

reSITE is a platform for discourse on the urbanized world. Talks, podcasts, stories.

Final Thoughts

5 ways lock down will impact how we design the built environment – a thought piece based on some experimental sprints held at Buro Happold. (Buro Happold)

The skinny: This thoughtful exercise at a globally leading engineering firm produced some great takeaways. Firstly, the “commute” we have all been missing isn’t just a liability but equally an asset. What happens when we commute to work through various ways is we gain serendipity. And serendipity is what we have been missing in our lives. The folks at Buro Happold ask, should the commute be rethought as a type of “play space”? This is just one of the five interesting ideas that came about from this Buro Happold experiment. 

Issue Index

I have mentioned the following companies and solutions in this issue (see above):

AIA – guides on the smart reopening of buildings by building type

Buro Happold

Certain Measures

Cover

Katerra

Sidewalk Labs

THR-3 Robot

RPBW – Renzo Piano Building Workshop

Rhino3DMedical

Closing Notes

Next month we plan to introduce version 1.0 of our Xpresso Reader Glossary and Index

The post Member Access — (emTech) Section Plus for Xpresso #17 appeared first on Architosh.

FOR LONG TERM READERS, you may recall our ToshLetter PDF newsletter from the last decade. Xpresso is the heir apparent to that newsletter, which in hindsight we realize now was actually a sensation that we failed to recognize.

Xpresso is purposely designed to focus on emerging technologies in the CAD industries, whereas ToshLetter was aimed more broadly. We have been learning that Xpresso readers are quite interested in general topics as well, and not just emTech. Duly noted, we continue to evolve the format for this newsletter. Let’s dig in.

The Top Ten Must-Reads

I’ve combed the Internet to find the most interesting, compelling, or controversial stories about the AEC and manufacturing industries, and the social and emerging technological forces at play on both:

1 – Practicing Architecture in a Pandemic, is the title of this New York Times piece featuring Elizabeth Diller of renowned architecture firm Diller Scofidio + Renfro. She discusses the challenges facing her practice—one where “usually we work, we draw, we look in each other’s eyes, we argue, we throw things around the room, we make models and break them apart, and somehow stuff gets made…” but unable to meet in groups the struggle is real and felt.  (The New York Times)

What’s the potential upside in this struggle? Diller Scofidio + Renfro is the selected architecture firm tasked with designing the new School of Architecture and Planning (SA+P) at MIT. The lessons learned from the pandemic may pivot the firm’s approach to how best to develop schools of architecture for a future pandemic. 

2 –  How should L.A. be redesigned for coronavirus? Are doorknobs out? We asked the experts. (Los Angeles Times)

The crux of the problem?   “If you take the great architectural inventions of the 20th century: the airport, the high-rise, the freeway — those are the things that are challenged the most right now,” says Brett Steele, dean of UCLA’s School of the Arts and Architecture. “They have great density or they promise movement at high speeds. Those are exactly the things that sit at the crux of the crisis we are going through.”

Is there a conundrum? Speed is tied to economics and competition. It is hard to imagine the forces of speed not acting on the future development of cities and architecture. Though Rem Koolhaus has recently made the point about airports now doing their best to essentially make the path to your plane as circuitous as possible in the name of commerce. And then there is “density”—a new negative for pandemics but a hero for sustainability and the environment. (see: Architosh, “Firm Profile: BOGDAN & VAN BROECK—The Ecology of Densification,” 11 Aug 2015). In short, the architecture and cities of the future will need to balance the demands of speed (economics) and density (ecology) in new ways that mitigate their intrinsic negative attributes in light of pandemics. Certainly, smart cities tech and planning will have much to say about this. (see next story)

3 – How Smart City Planning Could Slow Future Pandemics. This thoughtful piece suggests that the Covid-19 is a chance for us to re-evaluate the ways in which cities are built, maintained, and lived in. (Wired)

What’s the low-down? We are on an urban planet. “The global economy is living and dying by what happens in cities. Sadly, most if not many were not designed or built with transmissible infectious disease—or human health—front of mind.”

4 – AI Transforming The Construction Industry. This piece in Forbes discusses the ways artificial intelligence is being adopted in one of the world’s oldest professions. (Forbes)

What is essential in this story? The construction industry is realizing that for small-scale projects humans may be capable of managing complicated schedules and processes, but for large, multi-year projects, the kind that overwhelms humans when too many moving parts, delays, plan changes and unexpected delays through projects into chaos, artificial intelligence (AI) assistance may just be the what doctor ordered to bring control back into the process.  

5 – Architecture and Design has a piece on 6 practices bringing AI into architecture.  I wanted to share this piece because it brought up Stanislas Chaillou’s research in AI and architecture again. We covered Chaillou’s Harvard GSD thesis in AI in a past issue of Xpress. (A&D)

AI Build is a London-based startup focused on AI-based digital and autonomous construction systems. (Image: screenshot of AI Build website)

And other finds? While this article also touched the use of emerging technologies (emTech) in firms like 3XN and its research division GXN (we discussed this firm in a previous Xpresso newsletter) it brought to my attention AI Build, a London-based startup producing autonomous construction systems. Says the article above, recently, they teamed up with ARUP Engineers to create the Daedalus Pavilion, a 5×5 meter latticework.

6 – Exploring Potentials of AI in Revolutionizing Architecture. This short article, by a leading publication focused on AI, Big Data, and analytics, offers the more prevailing view that architecture, while highly subject to the forces of automation, is less likely to be radically eliminated by AI. Oxford researchers on AI suggest, “…even with AI coming into the scene, the essential value of architects as professionals who can understand and evaluate a problem and synthesize unique and insightful solutions will likely remain unchallenged.” (Analytics Insight)

Will this thesis on AI in architecture hold? It is hard to imagine the disappearance of architects at the scale expressed by Sebastian Errazuriz—who we mention below. However, one when one looks at technologies like GenDes—also discussed below—it is difficult to argue the virtues of powerful tools like Sidewalk Labs’ GenDes and similar parametric, AI, infused tools and tackling large problems with vast parameters that can all be “weighted” according to an architect, owner, user-community algorithm. (see Computational Design Tools News, below)

7 – Rise of artificial intelligence means architects are “doomed” says Sebastian Errazuriz, who is a New York-based designer who warned that 90 percent of architects will lose their jobs in the end to AI. The prediction is actually from last Fall and was made on his Instagram account. Stating, “It’s almost impossible for you to compete” with algorithms…adding: “The thing is you’re not that special.” (Dezeen)

Delusion or Reality? Most studies in AI’s impact suggest that the field of architecture is one of the most insular from suffering from automation. Errazuriz has a history of making noise, but is it signal? His Instagram post showcased an animation of a parametric tool developed by Wallgren Arkitekter and BOX Bygg. The tool in question is Finch, which was slated to arrive in 2020 as a plugin to the visual programming tool Grasshopper and Rhino. It still appears to be in beta. Will architects really be replaced by artificial intelligence? That was a question we delved into with six experts on the subject in the first issue of Xpresso, (see: “Pondering the Impact of AI (artificial intelligence in AEC Industries—the Wide View,” Xpresso #01). 

8 – U Penn students control robots remotely to complete semester work.  At the University of Pennsylvania, Weitzman School of Design, students in Ezio Blasetti’s course, Computational Composite Form Computational Fiber Robotic fabrication seminar completed their work remotely due to the pandemic. (Archinect)

U Penn’s Weitzman School of Design’s Robotics Lab supports work by the Autonomous Manufacturing Lab. (Image: screenshot of U. Penn. Graduate Architecture resources page.)

A sign of the future? A quick adaption and the help of remote access tools provided by Dropbox saved the day. Lessons? For sure, remote access technology is more important than ever and so are tools that allow remote control of laboratory equipment like robotic arms and 3D printers. 

9 – Engineering Considerations for Your Return to Work, is a technical report from CannonDesign, one of the US’s top architecture firms. This is a fantastic short report that serves as an excellent service message to all employers and employees. (Cannon Design)

10 – The US is gaining a $12 billion new chip plant that may signal a shift in high-tech ITC manufacturing in America. Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (aka: TSMC) is not only the world’s largest chipmaker but one of just three in the world that can produce the most advanced CPUs and other chips at a fab process 10 nanometers or smaller. (MIT Technology Review)

What’s does this mean? TSMC makes chips for Apple and Huawei, two big rivals in smartphones globally. But the latter is on a US Department of Commerce list of companies banned from receiving technology from US companies without a special license. While this story is focused on US-China relations and tensions over IP, the presence of an American TSMC plant may prove pivotal for Apple which may wish to exercise tighter control over future A-series chips. However, that may take years as the American planned plant is expected to make 5-nanometer chips first, not the cutting-edge 3-nanometer and smaller. 

Computational Design Tool News

Sidewalk Labs, an Alphabet subsidiary focused on urban development and building showcased a generative design tool the company was developing last December (2019). That tool is discussed and showcased in the video and images below.

Sidewalk Labs has several new products that folks can “pilot” including its Generative Design tools (GenDes). (Image: screenshot of Sidewalk Labs’ website)

While Sidewalk Labs’ website still says the tool, called GenDes, is coming soon, they are taking people’s email, name, and other information for those expressing interest in GenDes.

After watching the video below, you may want to sign-up here, so you can possibly get an early chance to evaluate this type of design tool.

Rediscovering Flux: Lessons for generative design software. This article over at Parametric Monkey, discusses Flux’s history of software development. What makes it interesting is Paul Wintour’s smart observations about why various efforts at Flux failed, starting with its Flux Metro software project which focused on the city of Austin’s zoning code and visualized all the myriad data inside that code.

Further Commentary: At the time Flux Metro was around, I was highly involved with a Boston-Providence area startup (Simulicity) and the SIM team was quite intrigued by this big bet the Google startup was making. 

As Wintour astutely notes, zoning codes are famously irregular, quirky, and also not machine-readable. This made Flux Metro not scalable. Flux would then pivot and come out with Flux apps and these two would fail. Now the company pivoted again in the digital twins direction with HelixRE.  Read on here. 

Construction emTech News

Advancing Automation in Construction. This company blog post by Brasfield & Gorrie discusses advancements in machine control automation in building site excavation.

So how does it work? Machine control users design models and GPS to position earthwork machinery. 3D models, AutoCAD files, and GPS data are fed into a piece of equipment. 

This U.S. construction firm is raising buildings via drone. This Verizon corporate story discusses Birmingham, Ala-based Brasfield & Gorrie again, this time talking about the tech-forward construction company’s use of drone operations to improve their overall construction operations.

Digital twins to play a bigger role in post-pandemic construction. This ConstructionDive brief makes the point that with data intrinsic to a digital twin, architects could better plan for social distancing in both new and existing structures.

What is the impact? Digital twins are not simply BIM models loaded with data, but rather a collection of models and textural information all intelligently linked together to provide an up-to-date virtual twin of a physical asset. The digital twins market today is worth $3.8 billion but will rapidly increase to $36 billion by 2025. That’s a 9x fold increase! 

What’s Cooking: Future Xpresso Features

One of our features coming up on Xpresso before it arrives on Architosh is on Autodesk-based firm, Stamhuis of the Netherlands. A retail specialist, Stamhuis designs and builds out entire stores in record times.

A Stamhuis developed store created and designed using automated processes in Dynamo with Revit.

The company is innovative and constantly evaluating ways to streamline its processes, at both the design, manufacturer, and erection phases. To streamline their design workflows in Autodesk Revit, the company has recently adopted customized Dynamo scripts that build a design for a new store in minutes, one conforming to numerous programmatic requirements and design standards.

We look forward to sharing this story in Xpresso #17 in July.

Issue Index

I have mentioned the following companies and solutions in this issue (see above):

3XN – architecture design firm

Autodesk Revit – BIM software tool

Dynamo – visual scripting algorithms-aided design (AAD) tool

Finch – a next-gen generative design tool

GXN – 3XN’s digital research lab

GenDes – Sidewalk Labs’ parametric AI design tool

HelixRE – AECO digital data services company

Parametric Monkey – Australian based consultancy specializing in AAD and BIM

Sidewalk Labs – a digital data-driven design innovator

Simulicity – AECO digital data and “design expertise” services company

Closing Notes

This is the first Early Access+ report feature on the (emTech) section of the upcoming INSIDER Xpresso #16. Xpresso is our free monthly newsletter focused on emerging technologies in AEC and manufacturing industries.

Upcoming Bonus! In the near future, INSIDER Members will gain another exclusive: an exhaustive glossary and index to every release of our Xpresso newsletter. We will index all issues, all companies, all products and services, sources of knowledge and insight. In short, everything written about in Xpresso will be indexed.

The post Early Access(+): (emTech) section for INSIDER Xpresso—newsletter #16 appeared first on Architosh.

On Wednesday, 9 October 2019, we will release the complete INSIDER Xpresso newsletter #08 to all subscribers. The newsletter from Architosh is free. Our Early Access editions of the popular Emerging Technologies section are for INSIDER members-only and include deeper commentary and more visuals than the newsletter itself. Our deeper analysis commentary will always be written in Architosh blue text.

Importantly, we usually deliver this “Early Access” feature—well, early! Unfortunately, this month I had a family medical emergency and it delayed this release by a week. To make up for that, our deeper analysis commentary is more extensive than in any past edition, and this is a trend I hope to continue going forward.

If you enjoy Architosh or our Xpresso newsletter, share your enthusiasm on Twitter or LinkedIn by clicking the social media buttons on this page. (thank you!).

Xpresso #08—What’s In This Issue

This issue is slightly more compact than previous versions. We discuss just three topics. The first is we go over who Xpresso readers are. We cover what percentage are Decision Makers and which are not. We also cover the spread of interest over various industries. Lastly, we cover what (emTech) topics they are most interested in.

In the middle section, we delve into a Harvard GSD student’s recent thesis on AI in Architecture. The entire thesis was only wrapped up this past May and is available online (link below). Two essays on Medium detail its main aspects and we dive into that.

Finally, we talk about Bricsys and its recent Boston Road Show visit. In particular, we are fascinated with its discussion of AI initiatives as discussed in Boston and we cover them in detail. As usual, for INSIDER Members reading this here on Architosh, I provide deeper analysis, commentary, and coverage than what is published in the newsletter, a unique benefit of being a subscriber.

TOC emTech #08

• Xpresso Reader Demographics and Reader Interest Areas (with commentary)
• Artificial Intelligence in Architecture: Harvard Thesis Published (with commentary)
• BricsysCAD BIM Event in Boston—AI Discuss (with commentary)

Who’s Reading Xpresso

Last month we said we would share some demographics about who is reading INSIDER Xpresso. Those signed up for this newsletter are overwhelmingly in the Architecture industry. Here’s the breakdown by industry (see graph).

As you can see, just about 6 out of every 10 readers are in the Architecture industry. Surprisingly, we have 1 out of 10 in the Software industry, tied with 1 out of 10 are the Engineering domains. So who is reading from the Software industry?

It turns out over 80 percent of those in the software industry are executives and 85 percent of readers in the software industry are working for AEC domain software companies, while the remaining 15 percent are investment analysts.

Further Commentary (INSIDER Members-only). 50 percent of all readers in the software category are either CEO, CTO, President or a VP. Of the following leading AEC software companies in no particular order—Autodesk, AMD, Bentley, Bricsys, Bluebeam, Graphisoft, Nemetschek, Solibri, Vectorworks and several leading VR software companies—80 percent of those listed above have senior-level or executive staff reading Architosh INSIDER Xpresso.

Clearly, Xpresso has caught the eye of top executives in the leading AEC software companies and we are thrilled that Xpresso, in just less than one year has garnered so much attention from the AEC software industry. In addition to this, the Software industry readers also consist of investment (VC) professionals and analysts on Wall Street—totaling 15 percent of this 10 percent segment of readers. It may not surprise folks to hear that over the past two decades, Architosh receives regular emails from Wall Street investment analysts, asking for market analysis information, typically for the AEC industry. 

What Xpresso Readers Are Interested In

We also have some information on what Xpresso readers are interested in. While we ask just a few questions upon signing up for the newsletter, we asked for a multi-choice selection of interests (listed below):

• AI / ML (artificial intelligence and machine learning)
• AEC CAD/BIM
• Architectural Visualization (ArchViz)
• CAE, FEA and Simulation Technologies
• Computation and Algorithmic-Aided Design (AAD)
• CDE (common data environments) and Cloud-based Project Management Tools
• Robotics and Automation (including 3D printing)
• Drones and Laser Tech
• AR and VR Tech
• Process and Plant CAD/BIM
• MCAD and PLM

Given our dominant Architecture industry audience, with the next strongest segment being Engineering (10% of readers), it shouldn’t surprise folks that the least popular topics of those above are:

• MCAD and PLM
• Process and Plant CAD/BIM
• CAE, FEA and Simulation Tech

However, we were very surprised to learn that the number one topic of reader interests for our Xpresso readers wasn’t what we consider an Emergent Technology (emTech). Most of the selections above are emTech-related—or what we consider “edge-of-market” versus “center-market” technologies. For our INSIDER Members, we provide a very rare short break-down of the top three most interested in technologies from the list above.

Further Commentary (INSIDER Members-only).  It turns out that INSIDER Xpresso readers are most interested in AEC CAD/BIM, with 70 percent of readers selecting that choice for interest. No other interest, emTech or otherwise, had more than 61 percent interest. But our top five most interested-in categories by Xpresso readers are (in scrambled order):

• VR / AR
• AEC CAD/BIM
• AI / ML
• ArchViz
• Computational Design / AAD

At least three of these technologies are Xpresso emTech darlings. We have written about Artificial Intelligence (AI / ML) in AEC a lot. This issue also focuses on that. We have also had very high-level VR, AR, and MR coverage in Xpresso in the Special Features section. In issue #08 we focus on 3D printing and additive manufacturing. 

Robots Aren’t So Hot

It is important to note that we have spent considerable time addressing robotics and automation in AEC— which focuses on Architecture and Construction, more than Engineering. While I am particularly interested in robotics in AEC, only 4 out of 10 readers appear to be interested in this category. Bear in mind that 25 percent of all Xpresso readers are in either Engineering, Construction or the AEC-domain Software industry. While the AEC software industry is on the edge and looking into Robotics, and while the popular press talks incessantly about labor shortages in construction and Robotics as a kind of savior for the industry, it turns out that among Xpresso readers this just isn’t that popular.

Xpresso readers are interested in a wide range of topics with VR/AR and AI/ML leading the (emTech) segment items. AAD is third while emergent technologies like Robotics lag behind these but not by much.

When we talk about “edge-of-market” (EoM)—a term Pete Evans and I first started using for our Perspectives on AIA BEST of SHOW awards here on Architosh—we mean both actual adoption and use of technologies but just as importantly, awareness within the industries of the availability of these technologies. Very EoM tech may have less than 1 percent adoption. Computational design, for example, may have less than 2 percent actual market adoption in AEC firms, despite the fact that architecture students have much higher use of AAD (algorithmic-aided design). 

It is important to note that of the five leading topics listed above, there is only a 20 percent spread between them. And now that we are aware of these favorites, our Xpresso coverage will better reflect the actual favorites of readers. 

AI in Architecture—Harvard Thesis on Medium

In May of 2019, Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD) student, Stanislas Chaillou, submitted his graduate thesis on Artificial Intelligence and Architecture. He has published two long essays based on this thesis on Medium, which we will talk about in a minute. The entire thesis itself is available here, titled, “AI + Architecture: Towards a New Approach,” available at ACADEMIA.edu.

Stanislas Chaillou begins his thesis by stating that Artificial Intelligence (AI) is “creating the conditions of a reflexive empowerment: the machine could become a trustworthy ‘assistant’ provided professionals educate it, or properly ‘explain’ the job.”

Chaillou’s thesis closes by stating that AI in Architecture isn’t in doubt as to its existence or imposition to the field but rather that it faces the challenge of knowing its key role as an “intelligent assistant.”

Just as importantly if not more so, Chaillou’s thesis pays particular attention to noting that AI isn’t a sudden technological disruption—though some may argue this a different way in the form of a Clayton Christiansen innovator’s dilemma way—but rather it “is the culminating point of 70 years of inventions and innovations” in and around the world of Architecture and Computing.

Inventions and Innovations, chart of progress towards AI in Architecture, by Stanislas Chaillou. (image: Stanislas Chaillou)

Chaillou’s these rests on research over 70 years of invention and innovation and on his timelines spans into four major periods of progress (1) Modularity, (2) Computational Design, (3) Parametricism, and (4) Artificial Intelligence. He says of these, they “are to us the four intricated steps of a slow-paced transition.”

Interestingly, Chaillou distinguishes between “inventions” and “innovations” as the former being associated with academic research, while innovations are induced by inventions. This idea may apply far more deeply to 20th-century digital innovation than to pre-digital industrialized progress. Carlota Perez roots each of her techno-economic paradigm (TEP) shifts (or Great Surges) from emanating from a singular invention. “In architecture, Innovations actually shape a continuously moving practice,” writes Chaillou.

Further Commentary (INSIDER Members-only).

At Architosh we have written a lot about Carlotta Perez, the British-Venezuelan scholar-historian specializing in technological-economic history as seen through her theory of great surges, a development based on Schumpeter’s work on Kondratieff waves. Chaillou’s terms “slow-paced transition” conjure up the visualization of the speed of ripples on the water after a pebble has been dropped into a still pond. This stillness or a false sense of stasis is just a period of time when a new “common sense” pervades society about how to go about doing things. Chaillou doesn’t take his four periods of evolution in Architecture towards AI and ground them in larger Kondratieff waves of technological progress, but he does emphasis emphasize evolution rather than dramatizing disruption. 

His Four Periods—Towards AI in Architecture

Chaillou has Inventions and Theories on its own timeline compared to Innovations. You can see his interesting chart graphic here (or the screen capture above). He shows the world of architecture and computer science moving from Modularity to Computational Design to Parametricism and finally to AI. To read his full two-part essay go here.

Further Commentary (INSIDER Members-only)

Chaillou’s timeline and its connections are quite interesting as origins for AI in Architecture. It seems reasonable to begin with Gropius’ “Baukastan” concept, a german word that translates to “construction kit.” The concept of modularity results in key terms like “grid” and “component” and leads to the world of buildings becoming further standardized. 

Walking through the history of CAD is to be expected in an essay like this but Chaillou lays emphasis on Christopher Alexander’s Notes on the Synthesis of Form written by the architecture and UC Berkley professor, a book that I was unaware had such a large impact on the software community. From Alexander to Negroponte at MIT to Gehry and Jim Glymph at Gehry Technologies, Chaillou tracks the history of computational design as CAD (computer-aided design). But eventually, it is Gehry’s work that requires control over more complex shapes that help lead our way to parametricism. 

Ivan Sutherland’s SketchPad with the embedded notion of an “atomic constraint” combines with Professor Luigi Moretti’s first ideas of parameterization. These ideas formulate together for Samuel Giesberg, founder of Parametric Technology Corporation (PTC), and lead to Pro/ENGINEER. From here it is Schumacher and Zaha Hadid that lead to David Rutten’s development of Grasshopper and the evolution of algorithmic-aided design (AAD). 

Chaillou’s thesis begins to break down when he talks about BIM’s origins, however. Noting correctly that BIM too is driven by parameterization, he states it “started in the early 2000’s” when in fact BIM, as a shipping product, began with the Virtual Building concept by GRAPHISOFT. 

BricsysCAD BIM Event in Boston—AI Discuss

Back in late mid-September, the Bricsys folks were in Boston for an “international Road Show” of BricsCAD and AI. I attended this event with great enthusiasm and wondered how many people would show up. It was held at the Boston Society of Architects (BSA) building in downtown Boston and in the same room as most user-group meetings for various BIM platforms.

The Bricsys folks fancy themselves Revit killers. Could they be right? Their Boston event last month was quite well-attended for a company supposedly nobody knows about. Shocking, right?

My first comment about this even was the utter surprise of finding so many folks in attendance. Big names in the world of AutoCAD were there, including former Autodesk employee Heidi Hewett, now Product Owner, Bricsys/Hexagon PPM. Robert Green, also well-known in the world of AutoCAD and newly minted Director of Implementation, Bricsys/Hexagon PPM.

A considerable part of this event focused on the AI side of things for BricsCAD BIM. This is what we want to focus on in this (emTech) section.

Intelligent Collaboration Between Designer and Machine

Bricsys has a fairly large team devoted to artificial intelligence (AI). In one slide at the event, I got to see pictures of the folks involved in the AI team. It wasn’t one or two AI specialists. It was bigger than that. (see Commentary below).

The Machine

Don Stribu, VP Communications, Bricsys/Hexagon PPM, delivered the interesting AI section of the presentation. Because it was here that they laid out the rough framework for how AI interfaces the human designer. Stribu started by asking the question, what is the AI good for versus what is the human good for? Here’s where AI can help:

• Repetitive Tasks — common CAD/BIM today is filled with repetitive tasks, from completing dialog boxes, repeating common elements, etc. Bricsys is looking at all forms of repetitive tasks and looking at how AI can do these tasks partly or completely for the human designer. This speeds up work, saves time and money and even errors.
• Design Documentation — Bricsys knows that you can train AI’s to learn and understand; they can be trained to recognize patterns. For example, given a particular building design, where should cross-sections of the building be drawn? They are working on training AI to understand this and to just implement them automatically without human intervention. If the human disagrees, they can easily override the choice and move sections to other parts of the building.
• Local Solutions Based on Experience — this is where AI gets really interesting. By seeing how various details are dealt with in other areas of the building, the AI can complete the details in similar areas.
• Style suggestions as inspiration — a more questionable area for AI integration, an AI can find sources of inspiration based on example inputs.
• Complexity Management — this is a very good area where AI can aid human designers by helping to oversee complexity in a project and alert human architects to areas of concern.
• Verification of Design Goals — AIs can run tests to verify that building designs are meeting stated goals and building codes compliance.

Before we move on to what the Human does best versus the AI, let me share some of my thoughts based on 30 plus years of practice in architecture.

Further Commentary (INSIDER Members-only).

BricysCAD BIM’s best AI-inspired technology thus far, in my view, is the BIMify technology that enables human designers to freely model and let the system self-assign elements to correct classification—that is, this is a roof, a floor, a column, a window, etc. This removes an awkward step in design: pre-selecting element types in order to model or create architecture. 

Heidi Hewett is a well-known name in the AutoCAD world. But she has moved to Bricsys because she believes in their technologies.

What architects like myself really want to see with AI is a way to dramatically accelerate our processes—particularly construction documents but also getting from design models to construction documents. Bricsys needs to also think about AAD (algorithmic-aided design) tools and how designers can parameterize complex overall forms that drive (child) dependent forms and elements. But we understand that the Hexagon company has plans to achieve this with the help of the Rhino+Grasshopper folks. 

The Human

Where do Bricsys think the human has their strengths? From the slide above this is where:

• Identifying design goals — human architects will feed the system with the necessary data so that AIs can understand what the goals are.
• Prototyping — just as AI’s will be trained to automatically generate coordinated drawing documentation, they will also generate prototype designs for humans to evaluate.
• Style and Detail Choices — naturally human architects will rule in the area of architectural expression—style, history, contextualization, material and color selections, etc.
• Aesthetics — same as above, humans will handle all aesthetics considerations in terms of final decisions.
• Constructive Feedback — humans will train AIs via feedback loops that strengthen AIs to better help them with the AI tasks listed above
• Innovation — only humans can do true innovation.

The Bricsys folks admit that many of these bullet points are still goals for them and they have no serious solutions with AI in all of these areas, but they are working very hard on them. Part of their overall argument is that they feel they have a very strong AI team that can bring industry-first innovations to the use of artificial intelligence to BIM in the AEC market.

Further Commentary (INSIDER Members-only)

So Bricsys has an AI R&D team size of approximately 10 people. This isn’t paltry but it also isn’t massive. Given their overall team size the size of this team looks appropriately aggressive in terms of pushing for advancements in artificial intelligence (AI) in BIM. 

Final Comments

The (emTech) section of Issue #08 of our monthly newsletter (INSIDER Xpresso) is a bit different this month. We just focused a bit more on a few items rather than cover lots and lots of other topics across a range of our emergent technologies focuses. Please let us know how you like this format or if you prefer us covering more topics but at a thinner coverage level. You can write to us at Xpresso@architosh.com

Please be sure to read the Special Feature in the email newsletter. And if you are an INSIDER Member subscriber reading this, please consider subscribing to our free Xpresso newsletter.

The post Early Access: (emTech) section for INSIDER Xpresso—#08 appeared first on Architosh.

On Sunday 1 September 2019, we will release the complete INSIDER Xpresso newsletter #07 to all subscribers. The newsletter from Architosh is free. Our Early Access editions of the popular Emerging Technologies section are for INSIDER members-only and include deeper commentary and more visuals than the newsletter itself. Our deeper analysis commentary will always be written in Architosh blue text.

If you enjoy Architosh or our Xpresso newsletter, share your enthusiasm on Twitter or LinkedIn by clicking the social media buttons on this page. (thank you!).

Xpresso #07—What’s In This Issue

Last month’s INSIDER Xpresso issue #06, we asked readers of our newsletter to offer us feedback—good or bad or both—to tell us what they liked and disliked about Xpresso. In exchange, they got INSIDER Membership subscription on Architosh for one year, gratis. That offer naturally still stands. If you are already an INSIDER Member you will gain another free year.

Some of the best comments were criticisms that we want to respond to. The first was, “the newsletter is a bit too long.” And thus, it cannot be read in one sitting. The suggestion was that readers would also benefit if there was an organization to help them jump back into it after one sitting. The other suggestion was that all the links be summarized into a table and organized. In this issue, we are addressing both. At the end of this (emTech) section, you will find a listing of company/products listed. And a TOC (table of contents) for the emTech section itself below.

TOC emTech #07

• A Note About the Size of the Global Construction Industry: With Commentary
• The House that Robots Built — DFAB House on the BBC
• AI in Construction – With Commentary
• AI in Architecture – With Commentary

The vast numbers of subscribers to Architosh INSIDER Xpresso are in the AEC industry. We will share some statistics with all readers likely in the next or thereafter issue. Folks in the AEC industry are naturally inclined to learn about its size. The size of the global construction industry and its rate of growth are continuously gauged, projected, and estimated.

Key Takeaways:  The global construction industry will outpace global GDP growth by 1 percent from here until 2030. The US, China, and India dominate, marking key growth markets for international AECO sector firms. 

PWC has sponsored a new report that says the global construction industry will reach USD 15.5 trillion by 2030, with three countries—China, US and India—leading the way and accounting for 57 percent of all global growth. That growth is based on average global construction growth of 3.9 percent to 2030—outpacing that of global GDP by one percentage point.

India’s construction economy will grow trice as fast as China’s construction industry. It also notes that the UK will overtake Germany to become the largest construction market in Europe and the sixth-largest market in the world by 2030. India and the UK are, therefore, top growth engines to keep an eye on. This should mean that AECO industry software companies should position themselves for these key standout markets.

The global construction industry was USD 10.6 trillion in 2017 and rising to USD 12.7 trillion in 2022.

Further Commentary: Ian Bremmer, founder of Eurasia Group and author of Us vs Them: The Failure of Globalism, makes the note that India will overtake China as the most populous country on earth in five years. It also notes that India has the most distressed infrastructure of a major global economy. Finding India on the list of top three countries for construction might surprise, but given its population explosion (50 percent of the population is under 25) it is a country in desperate need of infrastructure improvements for a multitude of reasons. Chief among them: getting young people to sources of education and higher-learning to prepare them for a country that is ripe for automation to displace workers. 

The Economist wrote back in 2017 that American builders’ productivity had plunged by half since the late 1960’s. This is the core problem facing the AECO industry. Productivity has stalled for 40 plus years, despite digital technologies. This time, AI, machine learning and other emerging technologies may make the critical difference. The rest of this issue focuses on AI and ML in construction and architecture and the new technologies and companies that aim to generate productivity gains in AECO.

The House that Robots Built — DFAB House on the BBC

The BBC series “The Disruptors” had a segment focused on DFAB HOUSE and the Robotic Fabrication Lab (RFL) which are associated with ETH Zürich in Switzerland.

DFAB House utilized advanced digital technologies including robotics to show what is possible with transformative technologies in AEC. (image: screen capture from BBC video)

“What if robots built your house, what would it look like?” is the essential question being answered by this research project.

DFAB House is the result of a researched process to answer that very question. It features components and methods of construction that today are each individually being explored with robotics and computational design.

Computational design allowed for uniquely angled wood framing that used less wood to build. (image: screen capture from BBC video)

An image of the wood structure using less wood but more uniquely spaced members. (image: screen capture from BBC video)

For instance, its frame is made of solid wood members. The frame is entirely built by a pair of robots that assemble each wood member using wood screws and bolts. You can watch snippets of the pair of robots in action building the frame. What is unique isn’t just the construction but also the design. The frame doesn’t look like conventional wood framing, with studs and joists spaced at set intervals. Instead, the framed members are set at various angles, resembling truss design, that absorb gravity and lateral forces in such a way that the structure is composed of less wood actually than if conventionally framed. In this case, algorithms designed a more sustainable structure in wood and robots built it.

Installation of the unique floor structure. (image: screen capture from BBC video)

DFAB House also features a curvilinear concrete wall and there a robot tied the steel rebar. Here on INSIDER Xpresso we have shown and discussed robots designed specifically for the purpose of tying rebar. At DFAB House robots weld the rebar and steel frame in the main wall, which the DFAB team says humans would have found it almost impossible to construct unaided.

The roof is even more aggressive and strange. An organic-shaped mold was 3D-printed and became the formwork for the structural concrete roof. Each piece was lifted into place using a crane. (see picture). Robots are a long way from replacing humans on job sites, but they are excellent candidates for supplementing humans doing repetitive, heavy, dangerous and boring work. For example, we have written about SAM (semi-automatic mason) developed by Construction Robotics in the US. It can lay a masonry wall much faster than men but still needs the aid of men to set-up the work, tidy up mortar finished joints, etc. The DFAB article mentions Japanese company Komatsu, which sells GPS-based diggers for site earthmoving work. The GPS system knowns where the buckets are in the project world to within one or two centimeters.

The results of DFAB House are interesting and informative. They show us where some of the possibilities are with both the design and construction of buildings. The entire BBC segment is found here. (video included)

AI (Artificial Intelligence) in Construction

OpenSpace raises USD 14 million in a series-A round. The company makes an AI platform that visually tracks construction projects. Notable participants in its series-A include WeWork, Suffolk Construction, Navitas and others. OpenSpace’s solution involves software, naturally, and a Garmin VIRB 360 camera that builders strap to their hardhats to document site progress. The images are then mapped automatically to project plans and are naturally date-organized, enabling users to track progress visually using the captured images, which are themselves organized using machine intelligence (AI-ML) and computer vision. BusinessInsider Prime (subscription) has an inside look at the pitch deck OpenSpace used to raise their series-A round.

OpenSpace uses computer vision and machine learning to provide a solution that solves numerous issues for contractors, including RFI support and others.

The global market for AI in construction is now forecasted to reach USD 4.51 billion by 2026, according to a new report here. Notable in the report is that small and medium-sized organizations will witness higher growth rates of 35.8 percent during the forecast period.

Robots and drones are clocking in on construction sites, reports the Arizona Daily Star. Virtual Construction Technician and Virtual Construction Supervisor are new titles that are popping up on recruiting sites in the AEC industry. The article notes that drones may, one day, paint skyscrapers or other tall structures, reducing “risk” inherent to jobs involving heights.

The Chilean software company, Calidad Cloud. Founded seven years ago, the firm has 80 plus clients for its data management application, which uses AI to handle and predict quality assurance in projects through the use of data algorithms.

Pype’s upcoming SmartPlans uses AI to automatically analyze blueprints and determine require submittals.

Pype readying Q4 launch of SmartPlans, says ConstructionDive. The new product, according to its developer, can dramatically reduce the time necessary to help teams locate and organize critical information from blueprints. SmartPlans uses AI to analyze a set of blueprints and find and organize all embedded submittal information, including product, equipment, and finish schedules.

Autodesk Brazil president says in BNAmericas that Brazil’s construction industry has enjoyed healthy margins for years and this has partly explained why investment in technologies, including AI, has been very slow by infrastructure and construction companies in the country.

Here are some other basic market size data on AI in the construction market. Global Artificial Intelligence in Construction Market 2019 forecast to 2024. From 2019 – 2023 will grow by over USD 1.1 billion.

AI and Architecture and Design

Architectural Digest in August noted an ongoing research program by McKinsey Global Institute that says that every occupation includes multiple types of activities and each has a “different requirement for automation.”  Quoting:

Almost all occupations have a partial automation potential. And so, almost half of all the work done by humans can eventually be taken over by a high intelligence computer.

Citing a recent study by University College London (ULC) and the University of Bangor, architecture industry employees will not be replaced by AI anytime soon but in the near future the architecture industry will undergo massive transformations. The article notes that repetitive tasks are ideal for automation, saying that: Computers can replace tedious repetitive activities, “optimising the production of technical material and allowing, among other things, atomise the size of architectural offices. Each time fewer architects are needed to develop more complex projects.”

Further Commentary: The article makes the correct note that architects typically use knowledge from past design and construction projects. But the AEC industry as a whole has been lacking knowledge management systems for quite some time. Architects, in particular, rarely utilize any kind of knowledge management (KM) software solutions and there are no major software industry firms producing such systems specifically to help architects capture and manage knowledge useful for repurposing and future projects. 

OpenSpace’s tool of capturing visual photographic imagery over the construction lifecycle of a building project is itself useful to architects, who often need to refer to book resources or data on multiple websites to understand construction techniques, particularly with newer systems not familiar to an architecture firm. Younger architects often stymied during construction documentation due to a lack of this type of knowledge. While less sexy than using machine learning to automatically generate designs using algorithms that satisfy criteria the architects have programmed into a system, AI in architecture might begin to make practical steps towards data management. 

Issue Index

We have mentioned the following companies and solutions in this issue (see above).

Calidad Cloud — construction industry software.

Komatsu SmartConstruction — GPS based diggers.

OpenSpace — construction industry software.

SmartPlans — construction industry software.

SAM100 — construction industry robot for masonry work.

Closing Notes

If you are an INSIDER Member on Architosh you are reading this exclusively, as only subscribers to INSIDER membership have early access to the (emTech) section of the upcoming Xpresso newsletter.

If you are an INSIDER Member reading this article and have not yet signed up for the INSIDER Xpresso newsletter, you can sign-up here for free. The monthly focuses on emerging technologies (emTech) and their impact on CAD and BIM-based industries and society as a whole.

INSIDER Members with annual subscriptions gain early access to Xpresso features—such as the (emTech) section you just read.

The post Early Access: (emTech) section for INSIDER Xpresso—#07 appeared first on Architosh.

On Sunday 4 August 2019, we will release the complete INSIDER Xpresso newsletter #06 to all subscribers. The newsletter from Architosh is free. Our Early Access editions of the popular Emerging Technologies section are for INSIDER members-only and include deeper commentary and more visuals than the newsletter itself. Our deeper analysis commentary will always be written in Architosh blue text.

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Xpresso #06 — A Word About the Next Issue (and the last)

Firstly, a word about Xpresso #05. In the Early Access version of the Xpresso #04, we said we would veer off-topic and deliver a report on the new Mac Pro (2019). We decided to switch topics and deliver a feature on The Game-ification of Architecture.

In this #06 issue, we are delivering the second part of The Game-ification of Architecture. In the first part, we delivered a feature on Epic’s role with Unreal Engine and its future moves. In this August’s Xpresso (#06) we tackle the same but with a focus on Unity. Both features were based on in-depth interviews with both companies. “Game-ification” relates to the transfer of both game industry technologies (in soft and hardware) as well as the relationship between the user and the 3D environment or object. And by the “environment,” we mean to include the dynamics of virtualized physical environments.

This month’s Xpress (emTech) section dives deep into a series of articles on computational and generative design, in particular. However, we begin this section with an interesting read from The Wall Street Journal that has applicability to the question that may come up to seasoned professionals in AEC fields. That question is: should I pivot my career towards emergent technology domains to best prepare for the future of my career?

Parametric, generative design tool companies are popping up everywhere in AEC because the technology is finally proving its value to enterprise AEC workflows. A lot of the new tools are in the pre-design stage. This image is from Finch3D, which we discuss below.

After this neuroscience article and the deep dive in generative design, we finish with more curated news on Robots in Construction, and AR/VR news.

Neuroscience Informs Our Next Career

Rich Karlgaard has written a very thoughtful piece in The Wall Street Journal titled, “It’s Never Too Late to Start a Brilliant Career.” His article focuses on two lines of thought at once—criticizing the current era’s somewhat insane focus on early achievement while also highlighting possibilities for older people to achieve greatness far later in life. He uses neuroscience to make his case.

Karlgaard’s article recites the latest neuroscience that argues that human beings’ brains have multiple cognitive peaks throughout their lives, and hence we are capable of great changes at any age and finding our personal geniuses even later in life. This is reassuring news. Many younger Boomers and GenXers may find they are confronted, in the next decade, by the Era of AI directly in their mid to late-career. And many will also feel that it is not within them to re-educate and pivot for a career path in the very technologies that are making their older positions less valuable or obsolete. So what should they do?

Does it make sense for a 50-year-old structural engineer or architect to become a data scientist, computational designer, or software programmer to strengthen their placement within their AEC industry? With looming high-tech infused transformative firms sprouting up all around the industries that make our environment and the things in our environment, it is tempting to see a firm like Spacemaker (AI, big data AEC firm), Katerra (automation, AI AEC firm) or Digital Blue Foam (AI, big data, AEC firm) as indicators of this looming transformation. The question for established professionals becomes: how to best prepare for it?

A Neurological Basis – The Role of Executive Function

Neuroscientists Laura Germine and Joshua Hartshorne measured the abilities of nearly 50,000 adults across all ages on a battery of cognitive tests. Their conclusion was that at any given age you are getting better at some things, getting worse at some things, and plateauing at some things. So what are some common results, by age?

Spacemaker is just one of the new AI, big data and generative design infused companies that portend to large disruption in AEC domains. Both existing professionals in AEC and even the institutions of higher learning serving these domains may be caught wrong-footed in the coming years.

Speed of information processing appears to peak early, around 18-19. Short-term memory continually improves to about age 25 and then levels off for another decade. Evaluating complex patterns, including other people’s emotional states, peak much later in life—in people’s ’40s and ’50s. In turns out that adults need most of their early if not late 20’s to fully develop their prefrontal cortex, the area of our brain in charge of executive functioning. As Karlgaard writes, “…the prefrontal cortex develops the ability to better communicate with other parts of the brain, especially those associated with emotions and impulses so that all areas of the brain can be included in complex processing such as planning and problem-solving.”

Karlgaard writes that the latest findings confirm cognitive research that says we have two types of intelligence: fluid and crystallized. The former is our base capacity to reason and solve novel problems, “independent of knowledge from the past,” while the latter is our ability to use skills, knowledge, and experience. Fluid intelligence peaks when we are young adults, while crystalline intelligence continues to peak during our mid-careers (lives) and beyond.

As I wrote in Xpresso #02, when writing about computational designers and programmers and their career advancement challenges, Mark Zuckerberg famously said in 2007 that “younger people are just smarter.” What Zuckerberg should have said is that 20-somethings have peak fluid intelligence and therefore software coding and skills like that favors the young, while managing projects and businesses shift the balance in favor of the older seasoned professional.

Further Commentary:  I noted in Xpresso #02 that Randy Deutsch’s book Superusers note the importance of computational designers in AEC firms but that their career paths are troublesome at the moment because the industry hasn’t yet fully embraced such roles and the technology behind them. I wrote that the AEC industry might learn by watching how the software industry (Mark Zuckerberg’s industry) deals with older computer programmers. Nothing Karlgaard’s article says changes that assessment.

Citing Georgia Tech psychology professor Phillip Ackerman, Karlgaard says that older adults can compensate for declines in “fluid” intelligence by selecting jobs and goals that are set up for their strengths in “crystallized” knowledge and skills. Experience, in this case, should not be discounted in AEC in particular. But just how older AEC professionals leverage that experience and combine it with new areas of knowledge and skills in the era of AI is a particularly fascinating problem.

Karlgaard’s article goes on to recite numerous examples of mid-career people who discovered their optimal cognitive peaks and combined it with their passions to excel into the roles and fields for which they were born. Karlgaard, himself, was one of them. Some of the examples are illuminating.

Computational and Algorithmic Design in AEC

A Forbes article by Julian Vigo entitled Parametric Architecture’s Embrace of New Technology touches on Patrik Schumacher’s talk at Grohe’s “The Wave of the Future” talks in Frankfurt, Germany. Vigo notes that while Schumacher and MX3D research head, Filippo Gilardi (also a Grohe event speaker) profess optimism for the virtues of parametricism—what Schumacher calls the “great new style after modernism”—such new technologies are not yet dominating the construction scene in places like China, which has suffered the death of 33 construction workers alone in just one recent month.

Author’s Commentary.

Vigo doesn’t really develop his argument fully in this short Forbes piece on Parametricism in architecture. He is trying to contrast the ramp-up in generative design in the field of architecture with the pressures of the fast-paced building in places like China, where safety standards are lacking Western countries. If anything, the increased pressures of the construction industry make it harder, not easier, for firms to pivot and reposition themselves around computational design and generative design. From a project management point of view, both require new inputs, tools and techniques and new outputs (or the ITTO in the parlance of the Project Management Institute. 

Finch3d.com is the source for a new set of tools for computational design. Finch is for architects and is a parametric tool that is currently under development and will be launched as a plugin to Rhino-Grasshopper during 2020. The developer is hailing it as the beginning of the “adaptive plan.” This means as you parametrically change the overall sizes (X and Y dimensions) the internal aspects of the plan intelligently and automatically resolve according to some rules. It is being developed by architect Jesper Wallgren. You can learn more here.

Can Algorithms Design Buildings? Daniel Davis pens an article on the “near future” in Architect Magazine. He writes that after decades of unsuccessful attempts to generate building layouts automatically, a spate of companies has suddenly proven it possible. One of those companies is called The Living, a New York-based research group founded by David Benjamin and acquired by Autodesk all the way back in 2014.

The Living used machine learning to train an algorithm to make sustainable use of wood boards with knots—the kind of boards that would often be discarded. This image, from a video on the process, is for an open-source laboratory for innovation in construction. (see notes below)

Meanwhile, The Living—which is self-described as a first-of-its-kind Autodesk Studio—combines research and practice and is focused on the intersection of biology, computation, and sustainability. Bio-computing, bio-sensing, and bio-manufacturing are three frameworks the studio harnesses. Some of its latest work (actually the latest is from a year ago) projects include a new project commissioned by Princeton University to develop an “open-source building” to host research for the future of construction with computation. An interesting aspect of this project was the use of wood boards with knots that would commonly be not utilized in buildings. The team trained custom algorithms to detect knots in wood and then invented a CNC sandblasting machine to expose the micro contours around the knots. A solar analysis of the facade was then conducted and used to arrange the boards to match the solar analysis. This created targeted thermal insulation based on micro contours. The results were really impressive (see image above and below).

Another project by The Living involved the Autodesk MaRS office in Toronto, Canada. This new 300-person Autodesk office and research space pushed the limits of generative design for architecture using qualitative metrics brought into the quantitative task of space planning. This video explainer for the process is definitely worth a watch and you can see it here on their website (or below).

Higharc is another generative, VC-based design firm specializing in the generation of 3D home plans and serving end homeowners and builders directly. Its VC supporters include the CPO of Adobe and the designer of the Nest Thermostat. Another generative design platform company is ArchiStar, which is aimed at property development class investors and their professionals. The system is developed in Australia and helps find, assess, and generate property designs using smart data and cutting edge technology.

Finally, another app listed in the article mentioned above, is TestFit, by Building Forge, LLC. Launched in 2017, TestFit claims to have the world’s most powerful building configurator. Called Residential Engine, the tool focuses on multi-family. TestFit is a full application that enables parametric whole-building layout design, including 3D considerations, functional use zoning, “make-up” of housing unit types, retail and amenity mix, et cetera. Through rapid iterations, its users can more quickly evaluate scenarios around various development lots.

 Author’s Commentary. 

From the generative designs being produced by Autodesk’s The Living to Higharc, ArchiStar to TestFit, what all of these examples demonstrate is that design professionals will soon no longer begin early-stage design work through trace paper and intuition around basic constraints. Instead, advanced-level constraints, at multiple weights of significance, can be input into generative design tools for pre-design and early-stage design. This work is then backed up with data and chosen solutions can move forward with more quantifiable backup. 

Computational Design: The Future of How We Make Things is Tech-Driven. This articles is actually from 2018 and less an article and more an infographic on computational design, put together by industrial giant Schnieder Electric. It does an excellent job of describing what is called “Classic Design” versus “Design Thinking.” The former may create a chair and say, “a beautiful and comfortable chair,” while the latter will say, “do we even need a chair?”

Robotics in AEC

Undersea robots could one day print oyster-based bio-cement to create undersea reefs to protect coastal cities. This is an interesting story in The Architect’s Newspaper, which suggests that the future of construction could be flying 3D printers. GXN is the research-focused spinoff of the Danish architecture firm 3XN and they are investigating ways for high-tech robotics to “break the grid” and offer new exciting methods in additive manufacturing. The firm is working with Dansk AM Hub, a foundation that supports experimentation in additive manufacturing. This is a great article that talks about 3D printers that can print fungus into micro-cracks to maintain infrastructure and prevent further damage. (Highly Recommended)

Robots 3D-print nine different concrete columns without any formwork. You can see the video here at this article on designboom, or below.

Using Grasshopper and KUKA robots for architectural design. We have written about KUKA|prc before but it is worth another post.

Will robots enable an architectural renaissance? This ZDnet article talks about a Danish startup using industrial robots to tackle difficult-to-produce freeform architecture. The article talks about construction robotics company Odico, which has raised $5 million after listing on Nasdaq. The company makes an industrialized freeform mold-cutting robotics unit for creating complex forms for concrete pours and more. Mixing a robotics arm with a hot wire cutter and rotating block, the robotics setup can create molds for creating double-curved geometries. Apparently the company has attracted the interest of Bjarke Ingel Group (BIG).

Tidbits for the Salon

Robots with human-like skin. Singapore scientists have unveiled a membrane that will let robots react to external stimuli in milliseconds—just like humans do. In essence, they have created “electronic skin.” [Robots]

Is AI the next big climate change threat? We haven’t a clue. Martin Giles reports from MIT Technology Review on the dire warnings coming out of the computer and AI industry how just how much energy AI’s needs may be. By 2025, some are predicting AI will consume one-tenth of the world’s electricity needs. Today it is estimated it predicts just 0.1 percent. [Sustainability] [Energy]

A (Very) Close Look at Carbon Capture and Storage, is the title of a report published at IEEE Spectrum regarding a new material called ZIF-8 which can swell up with carbon dioxide molecules are trapped inside. The discovery and research point to the possibility of using such materials as carbon capture layers in new greenhouse-gas-emitting power stations. [Sustainability]

HyperFoods: Machine Intelligence mapping of cancer-beating molecules in foods, is the title of a new research report for a study that uses AI (machine learning algorithms) help construction a ‘food map’ with anti-cancer potentials of each ingredient defined by the number of cancer beating molecules found therein. The goal is to usher in the design of next-generation cancer preventative and therapeutic nutrition strategies. [Machine Learning]

Roman amphitheaters act like seismic invisibility cloaks…possibly, says new research coming out of France. A report in Technology Review discusses the discovery that these ancient structures may have a secret weapon against the destructive seismic forces of earthquakes. The path these researchers took to this discovery took them through the center of Mexico, making this article all the more delightful to read. [Architecture] [Smart Cities]

Closing Notes

If you are an INSIDER Member on Architosh you are reading this exclusively, as only subscribers to INSIDER membership have early access to the (emTech) section of the upcoming Xpresso newsletter. This online version also has deeper commentary—the long intro on the Neuroscience piece is exclusive just to subscribers like you, as well as the additional graphics.

Just a note. If you are wondering where the Early Access version for Xpresso #05 is, we apologize but we were unable to produce that last month due to trade show attendance. Such occurrences shall be very rare, but we wanted to be open about what happened.

If you are an INSIDER Member reading this article and have not yet signed up for the INSIDER Xpresso newsletter, you can sign-up here for free. The monthly focuses on emerging technologies (emTech) and their impact on CAD and BIM-based industries and society as a whole.

INSIDER Members with annual subscriptions gain early access to Xpresso features—such as the (emTech) section you just read.

The post Early Access: (emTech) section for INSIDER Expresso—#06 appeared first on Architosh.

On Sunday 2 June 2019, we will release the complete INSIDER Xpresso newsletter #04 to all subscribers of the free newsletter. Our Early Acess editions of the popular (emTech) section are for INSIDER members-only and include deeper commentary and more visuals than the newsletter itself.

If you are an INSIDER member but not a subscriber to the Xpresso newsletter, no worries because as a member subscriber at Architosh you gain the same great content from the newsletter right here on Architosh.com (and earlier in the case of the emTech section) with all your other member-only benefits.

If you enjoy Architosh or our Xpresso newsletter, share your enthusiasm on Twitter or LinkedIn by clicking the social media buttons on this page.

Xpresso #04 — A Word About the Next Issue

The upcoming June issue will take us a bit off-topic as we deliver a comprehensive feature report on Apple’s upcoming Mac Pro workstation for 2019 as well as a survey research report on what workstation-class professionals are really asking for with such a machine.

Apple is expected to possibly introduce the new Mac Pro 2019 workstation at WWDC on 3 June 2019—the very next day Xpresso #04 is released. We are keeping our fingers crossed.

This month’s emergent technologies (emTech) section is a bit brief compared to normal as we prepare for upcoming conferences in the week ahead. Our summer issues for July and August will be jammed pack as we unroll treasures of information coming out of key AEC conferences we are attending.

We have AI in Architecture, Smart Cities, Robots in Architecture, Robots in Construction, and AR/VR and Computational Design news below—many items are very brand new to the market and not yet known.

Artificial Intelligence in Architecture

Princeton architects Barbara and J. Robert Hillier have recently made the largest donation in the school’s history to the College of Architecture and Design at the New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT). The donation will be focused on research into the growing use of artificial intelligence (AI) in architecture. The news from Princeton’s Weekly Community Newspaper states, “The use of technology and AI in architecture has soared in recent years, now spanning all aspects of practice. But there is [a] concern that those who don’t incorporate emerging technologies (emTech) into practice will be left behind.”

“The gift will allow NJIT to do research on how architects can embrace artificial intelligence (AI) instead of getting put out of business by it,” Hillier said. “What I’m fearful about is that with AI, you lose humanity.  So the question is, how do you take this technology and human experience and make them work together?”

Author’s notes: It is excellent to see a financial contribution of this size (though the exact size wasn’t given) that is squarely aimed at research into the core questions about how AI will impact architecture and practice moving forward and to focus on its impacts in the area of keeping architecture driven by “human experience”—a description that is as broad as it is ill-defined in terms of how architects operationalize their design and delivery methods. 

ArchDaily is working with the curators of the “Eyes of the City” section at the Biennial aiming to stimulate a discussion on emerging technologies, particularly, artificial intelligence (AI) and how they might impact architecture and urban life.  And André Brown, professor, and Head of the School of Architecture at Victoria, University of Wellington, New Zealand, writes about “What intelligent cities mean for our lives.” He mentions a study commissioned by Google that showed that the workday of an architect has changed by 42 percent in recent years (compared to other professions like police officers, 13 percent). He writes, “There are a lot of positive consequences of the use of AI and other digital tools in architecture—we can use them to design everything from better traffic flow to buildings that are increasingly sustainable.” The article is aimed at a general audience and another example of the rising popularity of AI in everything, however, Brown makes some key global observations, importantly that architecture and cities embracing emerging technologies like AI don’t lose sight of human needs and perspectives.

Smart Cities

Dr. Ying Jin, from the Department of Architecture at Cambridge University, UK, has built a computer model rich in data to help determine the future of Greater Cambridge. Called LUISA, the model is a lens to look at the future of working, living and traveling in and out of Greater Cambridge. From an article titled, “How to tend an economic bonfire,” in Research Horizons, one learns that Cambridge’s growth is a bit like an economic bonfire. “You can get a bonfire going and expand it as long as you keep feeding the center,” says Matthew Bullock, one of the founders of the business and academic organization Cambridge Ahead, “but you can’t pick a bonfire and move it somewhere else.”

The LUISA computer model is helping Cambridge in the UK better plan its growth in relation to its “bonfire economy” by treating development in jobs, housing and transport as one integral system. (image: screenshot from Research Horizons, Cambridge University)

Author’s note. It seems Cambridge is like Silicon Valley terms of commute times, soaring housing prices and stress. In 1997, the average housing price was 4.5 times the median salary. Now it is 16 times, making Cambridge the least equal city in the UK. The LUISA computer model appears to be a virtual lab for the future of Cambridge. It works with data at a very granular level and using methods honed over three decades of analyzing the Cambridge area. As such, it can see employment rate data at a richer level than national government figures. LUISA is unique because it can treat development in jobs, housing and transport as one integral system. 

“The Sins of Smart Cities” is a new article by Ruth Miller, published in the Boston Review. It asks, “what happens when we reframe complex social and political issues as technical puzzles?” To answer that question, the article discusses two new books that challenge the concept that modern cities thrive best when they make heavy use of data and technology. These two books argue that over-reliance on both has several pitfalls. The first book is from Ben Green, and is titled, “The Smart Enough City: Putting Technology in Its Place to Reclaim Our Urban Future.”  The second book is by Daniel T. O’Brien, “The Urban Commons: How Data and Technology Can Rebuild Our Communities.”

One cautious note that is discussed in this article is that cities today are “undoing the damage created by last century’s misguided dreams.” As we move forward with so-called smart cities in this next century, we would be wise to note our failures in planning in the last.

There are interesting criticisms of these two latest books in the article, including criticisms aimed washing over issues about race and the reliance of quantification. There is also the issue of cities and their impatience to capture the smart cities crown (the rapid pace of technology roll-out). Miller brings up Wired’s 2008 essay, “The End of Theory: The Data Deluge Makes the Scientific Method Obsolete.”  She writes,  it “is remembered to this day as best capturing the breathless impatience for the surrender to data.”

In her conclusions she writes:

“The Urban Commons and The Smart Enough City both challenge us to think critically as we develop our public data infrastructure, but the latter forces us to see how thinking critically about data means looking beyond the mirage of objectivity. For every generation, a new type of infrastructure consumes the focus of public investment, and so far every generation of public planners have relinquished our infrastructure to biases that fail their obligation to serve the whole public. If cities are to break this cycle, they must accept that even our technical problems are political at their core.”

Robots in Architecture

This is a regular (emTech) section for the Xpresso newsletter that we have only treated lightly thus far. Unlike AR and VR, for example, we have not yet published a special feature in this domain but aim to very soon. One of the surprising things I learned when we flew out to Seattle to talk to the McNeel folks about Rhino and Grasshopper (see: Architosh, “Inflection Point: Disruptions, Platforms, and Growth with Rhino + Grasshopper (Part 1),” 17 May 2016) was that Grasshopper had become the most popular languages to control industrial robots. You can actually see examples of that on the main pages at The Association of Robots in Architecture here.

The Association for Robots in Architecture, (ROB|ARCH) produces the KUKA|prc plugin for Grasshopper that enables Grasshopper to drive industrial robots.

The international association was founded in 2010 and is engaged in both soft and hardware development in robot pedagogics. A spin-off association of Vienna University of Technology, ROB|ARCH developed KUKA|prc, a plugin for Grasshopper that for the first time enabled robot control from within an architectural software. ROB|ARCH does an interesting thing that reminds this author of the early days of Architosh—it has mapped out where in the world robots are being used in the creative industries. (see image) The map includes a list that notes the homepage of each location and the robot type used. Notable American schools that have robots for use in architectural work include Harvard, MIT, Carnegie Mellon, SCI-Arc, UCLA, and Pratt. There are a few other American schools on the list as well and of course notable colleges and universities abroad like ETH in Switzerland. There are also some architecture firms themselves which possess a robot. Perkins + Will in Los Angeles, for example. And Snøhetta is another.

Map of world with industrial robots used for design and architecture—not construction.

Architect Patrick Schumacher, a partner at ZHA, believes that people need to adapt and learn to love the new architecture created by advanced technologies. He was speaking on a panel on the future of technology in architecture, hosted by Dezeen. “I don’t think we need to answer necessarily whether people like it right away or whether they buy into an aesthetic. I think we need to be market leaders,” he said. The article from Dezeen states that Schumacher believes people should begin to learn to hate the old because its wasteful of time, material and energy, and calls for an aesthetic revolution.

Robots in Construction

The construction industry may have been the last the of the AEC discipline areas to come to advanced technologies but with shortages of labor and skilled workers in a busy economy, contractors are actively looking at and putting to use robots on the construction site. A new market report forecasts that as much as 7,000 robots may take on construction work by 2025. The report further notes that robot suppliers to the construction market saw revenues of $22.7 million in 2018 but that will rise ten-fold to $226 million by 2025.

A Brokk robot handles demolition on a job site far faster and safer than humans with tools.

INSIDER Xpresso #02 brought focus to TyBot by Advanced Construction Robotics, a robot that ties rebar much faster than humans for large decks and bridges. A new startup out of New York, Toggle, automates rebar cages bending inside its factory, not onsite. Both systems are examples of robotic automation in construction.

So who are the major players in construction robotics? According to this report, Global Construction Robots Market, the dominant companies by market status, size, share, and profitability and overall growth are:

• Brokk AB (Sweden) — robots specialists going back to 1976 focused on demolition robots
• Husqvarna (Sweden) — demolition robots much like Brokk.
• Conjet AB (Sweden) — hydro demolition robots.
• TopTech Spezialmachinen GmbH (Germany)

There are a host of other companies, some of which we have discussed in Xpresso #02 which you can find a link to at the bottom of this report.

You can also see other companies in the video above (which we highly recommend).

AR, VR and Computational Design

A VIVE X startup called Mindesk has secured nearly $1 million in an initial seed round from HTC Vive, Barcamper Ventures, A11 Venture and Invitalia Ventures to develop real-time CAD collaboration software in AR/VR. What makes Mindesk different in the AR/VR space is that you use AR/VR for actual modeling within those environments. In other words—immersive modeling. Some basic forms of immersive modeling exist in other tools (The Wild, for example). With Mindesk software you can connect programs like Rhino to do immersive modeling in AR/VR.

Mindesk also works with Grasshopper and the Unreal Editor and supports multi-user collaboration. It works with HTC Vive, Vive Pro, Oculus Rift, and Windows Mixed Reality devices. It also supports a vast set of 3D modeling file formats. A 15-day trial version is available.

Nate Miller of Proving Ground and the Proving Ground team has launched a new video podcast. In their very first episode, they talk about RhinoInside, which we mentioned in INSIDER Xpresso #03. RhinoInside is so lightweight it can run inside other CAD and BIM tools and supports API to API connectivity. RhinoInside is getting very integrated with Revit, apparently. The question that emerges in this segment is if Grasshopper is now sitting inside Revit via RhinoInside and it now has the ability to author Revit families, is it now really a Dynamo killer? Nate says that Dynamo introduced really great new things into the conversation in generative design.

Nate and Co. explain that an advantage Rhino+Grasshopper has over Dynamo, besides a vastly larger and more capable ecosystem of tools, is its very fast geometry kernel and its ability to handle meshes and really good intersections, areas that Nate says are a sore spot in the Dynamo and Revit world.

3D Generative Innovator is also mentioned by Nate, which is a new tool by Dassault as part of its CATIA R2019X release. Blender and Houdini also have powerful node-based modeling technologies, where you can go from node to code.  Back to the Dassault Generative Innovator (see images below), DS has created a fully cloud-based generative node-based modeling environment in the same exact spirit and format as say Grasshopper or Dynamo. On the left side of your screen you have your node workspace and on the right side of the screen your 3D viewport. DS says its new 3D Generative Innovator unleashes “unconstrained creativity” that combines graphical visual scripting and interactive 3D modeling with the ability to use one or the other interchangeably at any time.

Dassault’s latest CATIA R2019X includes the new 3D Generative Innovator technologies with full-on node-based visual-scripting driven advanced modeling in the same vein as Grasshopper or Dynamo.

The new generative environment is meant for creatives in Architecture, Engineering and Design/Styling roles to quickly design, explore and validate variations of complex repetitive forms. The output from this environment is fully flexible enabling models to be used through design detailing through manufacture via the complete portfolio of roles of the 3DEXPERIENCE Platform.

Tidbits for the Salon

A climate change minimizer changes his mind after decades arguing against the realities of the evidence. Jerry Taylor, formerly of the libertarian think tank—the Cato Institute—explains why things changed for him with climate change.

In the wake of doctored Nany Pelosi video which Facebook knowingly propagated, Finland is giving classes on fighting fake news—a population-wide education campaign that reflects Finland’s total defense doctrine, where everybody in society, not just the government, is responsible for helping to defend the nation.

During the Cold War with the US and USSR, trade with the Soviet Union was only 1 percent. The Tech Cold War Trump is starting with China is between countries where the trade percentage is far from just 1 percent—rather approximately 1/6th of all US trade. China has reminded Trump and the US that America’s tech industry is dependent on rare Earth metals of which China is by far the dominant supplier. Meanwhile, British chip designer, ARM (Advanced Risk Machines) has suspended work with Chinese Huawei, the number two smartphone maker in the world. Huawei’s future Kirin processors were optimized for AI-based applications and were based on licensed ARM designs. ARM cut off Huawei because of the US-ban imposed by the Trump administration due to “US-origin technology.”

Driverless cars working together can speed up traffic by 35 percent, based on a University of Cambridge research project that demonstrated various real-world scenarios. They built a small fleet of miniature Landrovers and tested them on a dual lane roadway system. Take look at the video (quite fun interesting to watch). When autonomous vehicles work together by communicating situations they accounter that intelligence can help a coordinated response to all cars in the approximate area.

Alexa and Google Home already have the capacity to predict with 75 percent accuracy if a marriage or relationship will be a success just by analyzing verbal communication between the partners. Not only that, these technologies can interrupt an argument with an idea about how to resolve it, according to the latest research.

Exxon Mobile predicted that we would hit 415 ppm (parts per million) in 2019 for CO2 readings. The latest measurement as of May is 415.39 ppm. Nearly four decades ago an oil firm’s own climate scientists predicted with unnerving accuracy the trajectory of carbon levels.

Amazon rolls out new machines that pack orders far faster than human workers. The machines cost $1 million each but they do the work of 24 people. Author’s note. The way companies will tout these new machines as making work safer for other humans and enabling greater efficiencies that will lead to other new jobs in other areas of the company will be par for the course as the years go by. And the public will just have to watch to see if 24 jobs lost by a machine create 24 or more new jobs somewhere else in the organization. 

If you are an INSIDER Member reading this article and have not yet signed up for the INSIDER Xpresso newsletter, you can sign-up here for free. The monthly focuses on emerging technologies (emTech) and their impact on CAD and BIM-based industries and society as a whole.

INSIDER Members with annual subscriptions gain early access to Xpresso features—such as the (emTech) section you just read.

The post Early Access: (emTech) section for INSIDER Xpresso—#04 appeared first on Architosh.

On Sunday 5 May 2019, we will release the INSIDER Xpresso newsletter #03 to all subscribers to the free newsletter. Our Early Access editions of the popular emTech section are for INSIDER members-only and include deeper commentary and more visuals.

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Xpresso #03 — A Word About the Next Issue

The upcoming May Xpresso #03 will boast a special feature article on Varjo, the Finnish innovator in the VR market with their Varjo VR-1 headset with bionic human-eye display technology. We look forward to sharing that fantastic story with everyone soon.

This month’s emergent technologies (emTech) section is highly focused on Smart Cities tech along with great posts on AI (artificial intelligence) in smart city design and architecture. In addition, we cover the bases on AR and VR technologies.

Five Innovation Platforms Each Worth Trillions

Before we get into Smart Cities I want to call readers’ attention to ARK-Invest, an investment advisory services firm exclusively focused on capturing long-term outperformance and capital appreciation created by disruptive innovation. The firm is led by Catherine D. Wood, who was named to Bloomberg’s Top 50 Who Defined Global Business in 2018. She writes on their website:

If you are reading INSIDER Xpresso chances are you agree with most of Catherine’s sentiment above. So what does her firm offer us now in this newsletter?

In the firm’s Big-Ideas for 2019, ARK-Invest identifies five major disruption innovations that are the bedrock of an entire “innovation platforms.” These five are:

1. Blockchain Technology
2. Genome Sequencing
3. Artificial Intelligence
4. Robotics
5. Energy Storage

ARK-Invest believes that each of these five innovation platforms will generate multiple trillion dollars in market capitalization over the next decade, enabling further innovation. AI is the big one.

01 – ARK-Invest sees five major innovation platforms worth trillions of dollars each developing in the next decade ahead, spawning nine total related disruptive industries.  (image: ARK-Invest)

But importantly for INSIDER Xpresso, big ideas for accelerated core technologies and markets in 2019 include items like (1) 3D Printing for End-Use Parts, (2) Collaborative Robots, (3) Autonomous Taxi Networks, (4) Battery Cost Tipping Points and (5) Artificial Intelligence (AI) in the form of deep learning.

Author’s Notes: ARK-Invest provides end-users the abilities to get into investment vehicles that focus exclusively on these trillion dollar estimated innovation platforms. Reader’s interested should read here and here to learn more. 

As for these innovation platforms and our Emerging Technologies (emTech) topics, architects, engineers, and constructors all need to be aware of several of them. Principally, here are the impacts on AEC and Manufacturing:

• AI — We know that deep learning continues to impact new formations for our digital tools and literally cuts across every sector in AEC and MCAD. Importantly, AI needs to act on data and while the data that has been fed into BIM systems for years is of value, it likely pales in importance to the data coming from sensor systems and networks and mobile-based data that users generate that relate their well-being, whether in specific buildings, parks, or on the urban street. As we can read in several articles below, AI is helping urban planners and designers, architects and policy-makers create better Smart Cities for people to live. 
• Autonomous Taxi Networks — What does a city look like with thousands of roaming human-driverless cars, hauling passengers from point A to point B? The smart networks (think Uber’s logistics platforms)  can keep these cars moving and useful every minute, returning the vehicles to owners or fleet ports at the appropriate time. Car ownership will plummet and so will the need for parking garages and parking lots in towns and cities. This changes the way we must think about urban design and for architects how to make use of future unused structures and lots. 
• Collaborative Robots — As we read about in the last issue of Xpresso, the nature of construction in buildings and infrastructure can find great new efficiencies through the use of robotic labor. I see Drones as part of the robotic labor workforce providing intelligence services and features. Drones will soon be outfitted to watch over robots and robots will eventually service drones. As you can see from the image from ARK-Invest, Robotics is a trillion dollar innovation platform. 
• 3D Printed End-Use Parts — Tightly related to robotics, 3D printers and additive manufacturing as an industry segment has far-reaching impacts on everything we design and manufacture. 

Smart Cities

The world is facing a $15 trillion infrastructure gap by 2040. Governments around the world have been neglecting their infrastructure and its importance to the economy and human lives. Here in the US, we have heard President Trump tout a major infrastructure bill. Those who have dug deeper have learned that Trump plans, like other governments, to tap private investment partnership so that taxpayers are not footing the entire costs. According to the World Economic Forum article, however, private investors while ready with funds are “often unable to commit the capital required because governments have often been unable to create investment-ready project pipelines (a series of infrastructure projects presented in a programmatic way)—leaving investors unsure of how, where and when to commit capital.” Part of the solution to this issue is to evaluate the existing landscape of project preparation tools. This is where there are opportunities for technical design professionals to provide real-world case-studies that package up infrastructure projects into well-documented “investable project pipelines.”  Meanwhile, these countries are all building brand-new cities.

The world continues to become more urban. Worldwide the degree of urbanization (% of urban population) is 54 percent. By continent, North America leads at 81 percent, Latin America and the Caribbean just below that at 80 percent. You can see the full breakdown here.   The Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR), often associated with the Second Machine Age, is going to transform how humans live. In this WEF report, titled,
“Agile Cities, Preparing for the Fourth Industrial Revolution” (PDF download), we learn more about agility across numerous sectors, including: Agile Buildings, Agile Land, Agile Energy, Agile Mobility, Agile IT, Agile Security, Agile Education and lastly, Agile Governance. This is an older report from the fall of 2018 but worth a read.

Smart Cities experts talk about the risks and rewards of how Artificial Intelligence (AI) can be deployed in Smart Cities communities. In particular, local governments can streamline any kind of city service that tends to involve a queue.

Sidewalk Labs Releases Street Design Principles. Sidewalks Labs is the Smart City arm of Google parent company Alphabet. Read about their four principles of streets here. But here’s a snippet of SmartCitiesDive’s insight: “The mobility revolution means that roads that were once designed for cars are now having to serve bikes, scooters, and pedestrians, forcing a new conversation about shared use and safety.”  This last note about safety couldn’t be more important. Pedestrian deaths in cities have been on the rise and in the United States pedestrian deaths was the highest number in 28 years. (NPR report). US pedestrian fatalities have increased 41 percent since 2008 and now account for 16 percent of all traffic fatalities. Large vehicles, more people in urban centers and cell phone distractions all contribute to the rise.

01 – CityWays, a research project at MIT’s Senseable City Lab. Here is a screenshot of the landing page for the 2017 study. Senseable City Lab has been conducting urban research in Smart Cities for years.

China is one of the best places for experimenting with urban technology, says architect Carlo Ratti. He told Dezeen that “probably the most important conversation that should happen today is about Asian cities, and especially Chinese cities. According to some estimates, in the 21st century, China might build more urban fabric than humanity has ever built before.”

Ratti leads MIT’s Senseable City Lab as well as his Turin-based studio, Carlo Ratti Associati. He has worked on numerous interesting projects and MIT’s Senseable City Lab is a fascinating destination on the web for those interested in Smart Cities and the technology and concepts behind them. One such project that caught my eye was actually implemented back in 2017 and was called “CityWays.”

The project was conducted with the aid of Liberty Mutual Insurance and took place in San Francisco and Boston, to analyze billions of data from self-tracking apps to unveil how we move in urban areas. The study utilized fitness tracking applications present in 60 percent of smartphones. From that Big Data researchers were able to understand the activity patterns of runners, walkers, cyclists and the particular urban movement patterns they took through their city. The data, which was anonymized, also tracked differences by gender. You can explore the web-based interactive interface of the study here.

02 – A sample image of the CityWays research application on mobility patterns. Boston is shown in this image.

While the study naturally determined preferred locations and routes for each type of mobility (eg: runners in Boston prefer locations like the Charles River banks), other unexpected findings were that the presence of restaurants and grocery stores seemed to have a stronger effect on pedestrian activity than the presence of elements expressed designed for pedestrians—like benches, trees, and sidewalks.

AI, AR, VR in Architecture

We have spent much more time on Smart Cities in this newsletter release, visit older INSIDER Xpresso releases (#01 in particular) for more on AI and ML in architecture.

A French startup is using drones and AI to save the world’s architectural heritage. Active now in over 30 countries, Iconem is a French company led by an architect who was working in places like Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iran and Syria where archeological sites are getting disturbed, violated and destroyed. He decided to do something about it.

Architect magazine has a new piece on Morpholio AR SketchWalk, an app that brings floor plans into the real world. The new app utilizes Apple’s ARKit 2 release. The app works with multiple people as long as they have the app running on the device they can experience each other on a plan in a real-life context. Likewise, from ArchDaily, 9 Augmented Reality Technologies for Architecture and Construction. There are some apps in this list we were not aware of because they are relatively new so this was a nice find. How VR Technology Is Changing the Way Architects Design Your Home, goes through the many levels of how this technology changes perceptions from the client-side and how the exchange of information and feedback loops must naturally evolve.

Also, Gilles Retsin fuses AR with timber construction at the Royal Academy of London. (beautiful project so check it out!)

Our feature on the Varjo VR-1 headset is coming up in the actual May release of Xpresso in a few days and on Architosh for you INSIDER members.

Tidbits for the Salon

SmartCities require sensors and lots of them. The Sensors Expo & Conference 2019 takes place in Silicon Valley 25-27 June 2019.

AI researchers want to study AI the same way social scientists study humans. this MIT Technology article by Karen Hao asks the fundamental question, maybe we don’t need to look inside the black box after all, we can just watch how machines behave, instead.

nTalents.ai takes away The Bias In Hiring Process. This is news on a Bengaluru-based startup working in the area of staff recruitment for companies. They have developed artificial intelligence technology that can more accurately select candidates who are well skilled for the job at hand. Author’s Note: This is a fascinating find because there has been much written about inherence bias mechanisms in AI technologies to date. Additionally, why nTalents.ai’s technology seems “fairer” and a vector away from bias there are still darker sides to AI in the workplace, such as how Amazon is tracking and firing warehouse workers over poor “productivity.”  This type of use of tech may be hazardous to long-term life for all types of employees, forcing a world where, as The Verge article points out, “workers are pressed to ‘make rate.’ ”

An AI chip startup inches forward with $800 million in Series A round. The AI industry has helped reinvigorate the chip industry as numerous startups and spin-offs attempt to seek out advantages for AI in silicon.

IEEE Spectrum has an interesting article on Using AI to Make Better AI. This article discusses the use of a type of “AI neural network whose development the new MIT algorithm speeds up is called a convolutional neural network (CNN).” Author’s note. This is a short but fascinating little read. 

On Tesla’s Incredible Platform Advantage. The article by Steve Cheney reason’s that Tesla’s tactic of developing their own chip expertise and their announcement of the Tesla Supercomputer is analogous to Steve Jobs’ move to bring chip design in-house at Apple and create the famed A-series ARM architecture line that powers only Apple’s mobile devices and potentially their future Macs. Apparently, both Tesla’s and Apple’s chip teams share common thread other than business strategy—former PA Semi heritage. Recall that Architosh has written about PA Semi in the past here. (see: Architosh, “Future PA Semi—based Apple MIDs may utilize virtualization to address multiple markets, including gaming,” 7 May 2008.)

The core advantage is owning your own silicon destiny, something that only Tesla has going for itself in the autonomous driving wars.

Somehow we keep finding a way to end our Xpresso newsletter on an Apple or Mac note, despite the fact that Xpresso has nothing really to do with Apple in particular. We do expect that AI and ML will continue to be high priorities for Apple and we should hear news of such at WWDC in June.

If you are an INSIDER Member reading this article and have not yet signed up for the INSIDER Xpresso newsletter, you can sign-up here for free. The monthly focuses on emerging technologies (emTech) and their impact on CAD and BIM-based industries and society as a whole.

INSIDER Members with annual subscriptions gain early access to Xpresso features—such as the (emTech) section you just read.

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Introduction—INSIDE Issue #02

Xpresso #02 will focus on VR and AR technologies at its center. The centerpiece of this content will be an in-depth feature on Visual Vocal’s new AR/VR technology—also to be released exclusively for INSIDER Members as an early access article.

Below you can find our complete emTech section for the upcoming Xpresso #02 newsletter—with more images than we put into our newsletter version. We even have some video below.

Let’s get started.

Computational Designers and Programmers: Two Fields, Similar Career Challenges

We start off a discussion of our curated content on Emerging Technologies by briefly discussing the similarities of “computational designers” in architecture as compared to professional programmers in the software industry—noting that they both present career paths that could be better characterized as “risk journies” than paths. In an article on Medium by A. Jesse Jiryu Davis titled, “Ctrl-Alt-Delete” The Planned Obsolescence of Old Coders,” we learn that coders (software programmers) over their 30’s face a perilous career future.

Similar Long-Term Career Challenges

Similarly, we learn in architect and professor Randy Deutsch’s latest book, “Superusers: Design Technology Specialists and the Future of Practice,” that these coding types—computational designer specialists—face a perilous career journey in the field of architecture as they age. “Computational designers, by not following the traditional path, take a lot of risks career-wise, and the professional trajectory becomes more of a risk journey rather than a career path.”

01 – Randy Deutsch’s book “SuperUsers: Design Technology Specialists and the Future of Practice” is a compelling read on multiple levels. One particular chapter deals with career path challenges for these new types of AEC professionals.

But this is where Davis’ article is important because unlike the architecture industry, the average age of workers in the software industry is strikingly different.

Big Age Differences

“The software industry is overwhelmingly young,” writes Davis. “The median age of Google and Amazon employees is 30, whereas the median age of American workers is 42.” According to Data USA, the median age of architects in the United States is 43.7. For the software programmer turning 40-years old, they face significant challenges across the industry, with expectations that they should matriculate to management roles. This contrasts with computational designers (architects who can code) in the field of architecture who don’t necessarily have clear senior-level career paths defined across the industry. Common to both computational designers and software programmers, as they age they must keep up with the highly evolving technology. Then there is the large-scale bias by age.

“In 2007, Mark Zuckerberg, then 22, said out loud what many in the software industry think: ‘Younger people are just smarter.’ ”

But younger people in the field of architecture are definitely not thought of as just smarter as it relates to the core purposes of the profession. In the AEC industry, knowledge acquisition gained from project-based experience reduces risks for all types of AEC firms and their activities. In AEC, both knowledge and wisdom reign supreme. Davis writes, “According to a 2018 research paper, skills [emphasis mine] change faster in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) jobs than in other industries, and the headlong rate of change for programmers is especially severe.”

Deutsch is an advocate that more STEM-based professionals, particularly programmers (coders), are going to populate the profession of architecture and that their contributions are critical to the profession’s evolution and perhaps survival. If this is the case—and much evidence suggests that it is—than perhaps both of these fields should learn from each other’s role-based problems.

In the case of architecture, those who can code and love to do so don’t have proven career paths within the field (and aren’t be pushed into management) but can be valued as computational designers and design technology specialists for decades if they want to be. Age bias in architecture isn’t functioning against older individuals (not yet), unlike in computer programming fields. The software industry is recognizing that some coders don’t want to enter management roles when they get past 35. “As an alternative to the management track, Google, Microsoft, and other large companies define an ‘individual contributor (IC) track,’ a ladder of job titles for senior engineers that rise in parallel to the management ladder.”

This is precisely the challenge confronting computational designers or design technologists in architecture. The AEC industry might learn by watching how the software industry is dealing with older computer programmers—finding the roles they can grow into as they progress through their career.

Robotics in AEC

The talk about robots in construction began in earnest many years ago but the action behind that talk is only now truly beginning to take off. There are many new and exciting companies beginning to produce in this space. One of those is New York-based Construction Robotics with its SAM100 masonry robot. SAM100 stands for Semi-Automated Mason and is the first commercially available bricklaying robot for onsite construction. It has the capacity to lay 380 bricks per hour, six times faster than a human bricklayer. The company also has a new MULE135 robot which is a Material Unit Life Enhancer. The device speeds up masonry construction as well by not necessarily building a masonry wall by itself but by taking away the strain on humans dealing with modular masonry unit work. Construction Robotics is robotics in construction company worth watching.

02 – TyBot by Advanced Construction Robotics is a large-scale robotic rebar tying machine that can work to rapidly tie together rebar in large slabs and decks common to infrastructure work and buildings.

Some robots for construction can be quite large. TyBot by Advanced Construction Robotics is a rebar tying robot that is ideal for large concrete pours like bridge deck work. It can autonomously tie rebar, working behind a human crew and doing up to 90 percent of all ties.

Robots can serve to address the severe skilled labor shortage in many advanced economies. In Japan, for example, one-third of all construction labors are over 57 years old, while the number under 30 years old is less than 10 percent, reports the BBC. Robots that save the hardship on bodies can enable older construction workers to stay active on the job, while the technology side of robotics can attract younger generation—particularly GenZ—into the construction field just at a key time when Baby Boomers are going to exit en masse.

5 Ways Robotics Will Disrupt the Construction Industry in 2019 is a good primer on where robotics in construction is headed this year. Also, the British arm of the multinational development and construction company, Skanska AB, is looking to build next-gen construction robots.

“As part of the initiative, Skanska UK PLC will lead the Flexible Robotic Assembly Modules for the Built Environment (FRAMBE) research consortium. The organization includes ABB Robotics, Building Research Establishment Ltd., Exelin Ltd., Tekla UK, and the University of Reading. FRAMBE will review potential robotic systems for tasks such as cutting and drilling on construction sites.”

Standard robots today face developmental challenges. From a research paper on a new approach to enabling 6-DOF (degrees of freedom) robotic arms to master movement and manipulation of objects, this research study titled kPAM—for KeyPoint Affordances for Category-Level Manipulation—offers what appears to be highly useful advances. In effect, a robot can better recognize an object type despite size and shape that it has never seen before. (eg: picking up a high-heel shoe when all it has seen and trained on are regular shoes).

03 – Researchers behind the kPAM studies have found a new method to teach a robot to correctly identify and manipulate objects that the robot has never seen before.

“Our pipeline is robust to large intra-category shape variation and topology changes as the key point representation ignores task-irrelevant geometric details. Extensive hardware experiments demonstrate our method can reliably accomplish tasks with never-before-seen objects in a category, such as placing shoes and mugs with significant shape variation into category level target configurations.” (watch the video here).

AI, ML, and Computational Design

Another story from Robotics Business Review, Japanese large heavy equipment manufacturer, Komatsu, has teamed up with NVIDIA to implement AI (artificial intelligence) on construction sites. The partnership will use NVIDIA GPUs to communicate with drones and cameras throughout the construction site to monitor for and prevent accidents.

Andrew Brust of ZDNet writes, “With a seemingly continuous emergence of machine learning and deep learning frameworks, and updates to them, as well as changes to tooling platforms, it’s no wonder that so much AI work is so ad hoc.” Welcome to the solution—Automated Machine Learning (AutoML for short). This is a movement, not a company or solution. It means a few companies are starting to execute in this direction, helping non-data scientists do simple AI and helping data scientists do complicated work even faster. Uber’s Ludwig platform is one example. The article has many more. Here’s another example of democratizing machine learning at OpenML, now in beta 2.

Quanta Magazine on How Artificial Intelligence is Changing Science. An excellent read on what scientists do that can and cannot be automated and how science disciplines themselves can change or are changing due to AI. This is a great read as it relates to Architecture. There is an example of the use of “generative adversarial networks” (GANs) creating fake people from other fake people (though one could simply start with real people). The matrix results are truly stunning—and shocking! But they point at what may be possible with GANs and the world of architecture—something Natasha Bajc from last month’s Xpresso newsletter is studying.

04 – A partial screenshot of Uber’s Ludwig platform that aims to democratize AI. Ludwig is a toolbox that allows to train and test deep learning models without the need to write code.

The man who helped invent virtual assistants thinks they are doomed without a new AI approach. This MIT Technology Review article is a great read. It implies that we need to train AIs more like human babies learn. 

Author’s notes: Each month our emTech section will highlight content in the AI and ML space that takes us a step into the world of its use in AEC as well as backs out to the broader pictures forming and coalescing as this technology evolves and takes shape further within “market” and cultural realities. Japan is hard pressed more than any other country to deal with its declining population and shrinking labor force. It is not surprising to see big advances in AI and robotics in Japan’s construction industry. As industry players probe and explore AI and ML, it only makes sense that taking these tools into easier digestible formats will evolve. As we noted last month, AI and ML in CAD and BIM industries are in front of us. Larger market trends like AutoML will spill out into the bespoke computational space in AEC. 

Earlier this week I had a fun conversation with Daniel Belcher of McNeel. We caught up on all things Rhino and Grasshopper. This weekend TT’s West Coast Hackathon takes places. The Rhino and Grasshopper code bases are being further democratized as well, through initiatives like compute.rhino3d.com and the RhinoInside movements. the RhinoInside technology is what has made it possible for GRAPHISOFT, for example, to build their bi-directional connections between their market innovative BIM solution and the world’s most popular AAD tool.

05 – RhinoInside is a developer tool that in essence allows other applications to host Rhino and Grasshopper.

RhinoInside allows both Rhino and Grasshopper to be embedded within other products. And Rhino 7 WIP can also now run inside other 64-bit Windows applications, like Revit, AutoCAD and potentially inside SolidWorks, Photoshop, and Excel.

ShapeDiver is a new discovery for us, thanks to Belcher.

Tidbits for the Salon

IBM unveils its first commercial quantum computer. The IBM Q system is a huge but beautiful system that combines into one package the quantum and classical computing parts. The 20-qubit system won’t ship on Amazon anytime soon but the system is truly available through partnerships with IBM. Here’s a tidbit: the glass enclosure of the system was designed by Goppion, the company that built the glass cases that house the UK’s crown jewels.

In more supercomputer type news, NVIDIA outbid both Intel and Microsoft to acquire Mellanox, a chipmaker for $6.9 billion. The buy strengthens NVIDIA in the world of high-performance computing.

Robots and AR clean up on new funding. This article looks at some of the companies grabbing the dough. One of those companies is Kaarta, a 3D mapping company that looks really interesting. Another company we already know is Markforged, Massachusetts-based leader in industrial 3D printing. It has closed an $82 million series D fund.

Can AI help cities identification gentrification before it is really happening? This Reuters story talks about finding hidden gentrification. Could be really useful for developers and market investors including individual buyers.

Exaflop computing. US DOE is paying $500 million for Aurora which will be built by Intel and Cray in 2021. But China already has three teams racing to build final working exaflop supercomputers. The US is behind already.

NVIDIA’s GauGAN AI tool offers a powerful new approach to creating physically real imagery. 

GauGAN is an NVIDIA research project looking at generative adversarial networks (GANs)—already mentioned above and first discussed in last month’s Xpresso issue. The article reads:

GuaGAN could offer a powerful tool for creating virtual worlds to everyone from architects and urban planners to landscape architects and game developers. With an AI that understands how the real world looks, these professionals could better prototype ideas and make rapid changes to a synthetic scene.

Toyko 2020 Olympics will feature robots to help wheelchair users and workers.

Finally, something dear to Architosh readers—the next Mac Pro. Mac Pro 2019: Previewing the Possibilities explores just that and why it is exciting to think about what could be next for the next workstation from Apple.

emTech in INSIDER Xpresso #02

If you are an INSIDER Member reading this article and have not yet signed up for the INSIDER Xpresso newsletter, you can sign-up here for free. The monthly focuses on emerging technologies (emTech) and their impact on CAD and BIM-based industries and society as a whole.

INSIDER Members with annual subscriptions gain early access to Xpresso features.

The post Early Access: (emTech) Section for INSIDER Xpresso newsletter—#02 appeared first on Architosh.