With a Click: Reduce Cost and Climate Impact in Building Design

MATHIAS NALL: Hi, everyone. It's fantastic to be here again, and thanks for joining us today. It is my 13th time at AU and the third time as a presenter-- With a Click-- Reduce Cost and Climate Impact in Building Design.

KARIN HURTIG: And we all know that climate change needs to be addressed. Experts from all over the world agree that we already know a lot about how to fight climate change, and we do have the tools to do it. Now, it's time for action.

So how can we increase action? We believe that by making things easy to use, fun to work with, and easy to understand increases the possibility for action. And one of Sweco's solutions for climate action is called C3, Carbon Cost Compass, and that is what we will present to you today.

MATHIAS NALL: But first of all, we have the Safe Harbor Statement, and please, take a second to look through it, and we will continue in a second. OK. So Carbon Cost Compass, or C3, is a service and a tool that calculates carbon footprint and costs for buildings in early phases of the project. With C3, you can compare the result from different materials that you choose in your project. The tool is used by the designer, and there is no need for exports or external consultants to get the results. C3 is a guide for good decision, a compass for creating sustainable buildings.

My name is Mathias Nall, and I'm a Digital Development Lead based in Stockholm, Sweden. I've been working at Sweco for the past 19 years now, and most of it at Sweco Architects. I have a background as building engineer and have been using Revit, for example, since 2004, and also Revit server BIM 360 and now ACC. My interest in technology and curiosity for new things led me to my role that have today, more focusing on business development and digitalization. I'm also responsible for different activities Sweco has together with Autodesk.

KARIN HURTIG: Hi, and my name is Karin Hurtig, and I'm an architect with about 20 years of experience. And I've been working in a lot of different types of building projects, and I also work as a sustainability coordinator at our office. And that means that I'm supporting my colleagues to design sustainable projects.

And over the past years, Mathias and I have had the privilege of being a part of the development of the Carbon Cost Compass. Mathias started out as the project owner, and then I was the project manager. And in this presentation, we will tell you how C3 works, how it is designed and developed, what the technical solution looks like, and also show you what C3 looks like live on [? Sweco. ?]

So why should you use C3? Yeah. Well, buildings stand for around 40% of the carbon emission in the world, and a big part of that comes from materials and construction. So working with the footprint of buildings can really make a difference.

I-- and I know that many of my colleagues agree-- find that today it can be a bit of a struggle to address sustainability and climate impact in our projects. Some clients are on board and keen, and some clients want to work with sustainability, but they haven't done it. They're not experienced or haven't done it that much, and they are afraid that it will complicate things, that it's difficult and expensive. So they're afraid to go there. And this is especially in the early phases of the project, when they really don't know where the project is going to end up or what the total cost is going to be.

So I often find myself sitting in meetings saying these things, and I can really hear the client thinking, oh my God, here goes the architect again-- big visions, great ideas, but who's going to pay for it? And I can see where it's coming from. But every project have a climate impact and a cost, and it is in the early stages that we have the opportunity to make the biggest impact on cost and climate. So we need to get it right from the beginning, and then we can even get a cheaper building than we had from the beginning when not working with sustainability.

And we need to start early, meaning that we must evaluate key issues, such as cost and carbon early on in the project to get the best result. And we think that C3 can help setting the right goals for the project. By adding cost to the equation, we strengthen the incentive for sustainable decisions. It's much easier to make sustainable decisions if you have an idea what the cost of it will be, but it's not only the cost of the building that is interesting to look at.

We are all used to working in a linear economy, but to achieve a sustainable future, we need to start working in a circular way. And C3 can initiate a discussion on whether or not to work in different ways and look at the wider lifecycle for the building. We can use reused or recycled materials.

How can the building work as a material bank and be able to sell stuff later on? And what can possibly be [? disassembled ?] when we don't anymore need the building, and we can sell parts of the building? This we need to decide really early on, and Carbon Cost Compass has shown to be useful to identify these key issues for the building for the specific project, what to focus on, and how to move forward.

You often say that a picture is worth a thousand words, and we totally agree. We believe that the visual information helps the different people working in a project to speak the same language. A picture can really help us decide. When we're looking at a building, we can really understand when you're talking about the windows or the floors, whatever it is.

No matter what disciplines we come from, what expertise we have, looking at the picture, we have easier to understand our different point of views. And it's also much easier to grasp the direct result from the tool for calculation and the comparison between different variations, when you see it visually together with the design in 3D. Our UX design of the web window interface, we think it makes it user friendly, and you don't need to be an expert in a specific software to use it. Anyone can work in C3.

And another thing that's important with this C3 is that it increases knowledge. The Carbon Cost Compass helps architects and engineers to understand how their design really affect climate and cost, and this is because we work in our own design tool, our daily basis working tools, and in Sweco, in this case, that is Revit. To increase knowledge about carbon impact at Sweco, we have given everyone access to C3 to be able to experiment and learn about how this works. And also we think that working in this familiar environment gives us a direct link between the design, the materials, composition of the building, and its impact to carbon and cost. And by increasing this knowledge, how our designs changes, things we can improve the sustainability performance of our projects, and we can also deliver more reliable insights to our clients.

MATHIAS NALL: So in C3, we have aim to reduce the time it takes to get the calculations for a building, and in this picture, we have to try to illustrate the traditional way of working and the C3 way. In a traditional way of calculating carbon and costs, we need to export files from our Revit model into two different departments, could be Sweco or an external consultant. One department calculates carbon, and one department calculates costs. During this work, they have to do assumptions on materials. This is because it is in the early stages, and much is still unknown, and there is still no decision on what material to use.

When the consultants are finished, you often get two separate reports in PDF to evaluate. They can be a bit hard to compare due to the different cost assumptions made by each expert. That is the apple and pear you see in the left-hand side.

With C3, you don't make and export from BIM model. C3 consumes live data from the BIM 360, and we have already made all the necessary assumptions in the tool. This gives calculations based on exactly the same parameters that is the apple pear to the right in the picture. In the traditional way, if you change something and try new materials, you almost have to start all over again and wait for the consultants to do new calculations, which take time.

In [INAUDIBLE] [? C3, ?] you can try as many materials and combinations as you want without having to start the process all over again. The quick feedback you get in C3 saves time and keeps the design process ongoing. This turns out to be more important than we first thought. It opens up for deeper dialogue and a greater involvement of the project team.

KARIN HURTIG: Yeah. So Mathias, how did we do this? This project and the development of C3 started when Mathias got the request and the question from the highest level of management in Sweden, and they were asking, can we combine digitalization and sustainability in a smart way?

MATHIAS NALL: And the answer to that, Karin, is of course we can. I had also a smorgasbord with expertise that we could engage for developing C3. Expertise is good to have, and at Sweco, we have it.

We are about 20,000 employees across more than 100 offices, and our ambition is to help our clients solve any challenge, no matter scale or location. We carry out over 100,000 assignments in 70 countries every year. Sweco offers a wide range of services, and in this project, C3 brought together a broad range of [? service ?] expertise into one service. We use, for example, architects, IT solutions, sustainability experts, building calculators, digital services, UX and UI designers, software developer, environmental expertise, construction designers, and digital office.

Sweco was founded in 1958 by Gunnar Nordstrom, and he had a vision of a combined architecture and engineering company. The idea was, and still is, to bring different perspectives together to solve the challenges of our time. Gunnar had a saying, and in Swedish it goes, [SPEAKING SWEDISH] which means that it is heavy and slow to walk at the front of the line, be the first one pushing through the snow, and the people following behind have a much easier journey.

Change management can be difficult, especially when working with new technology and new ways of working. That was also the case for us with C3. This is also why we're so proud of all the attention, the awards, and the prizes we have won with C3 over the past year.

And in the struggle with innovating C3, one big question we had to straighten out during the development was how can you make decisions before you have the full picture? How can you weight the impact of different options before all the design work is done? To be able to calculate carbon and cost for buildings, we need quantity takeoffs, and as you know, that functionality is already in Revit, for example.

But connecting numbers and databases to a BIM model is not hard at all, but as you know, you only get the values or numbers connected to what you have designed in your model and nothing else. For example, if you have a generic wall, the model has no way of knowing how many wall studs or layers there are in the wall, for example isolation and plastic and so on. So how to calculate when much is still unknown? And our answer to that is recipes.

Our recipe describes the thing that you don't see or even have designed yet in your model. The development team did put together a long list of relevant recipes that can be used to sketch a building in Revit. The recipe is also the description of all included materials in, for example, a wall. It's summarizing the building costs for materials and man hours on site and carbon emissions for materials included in the recipe. We need and we can trust the numbers that we use in C3, and the reason for that is that the team together reviewed and evaluated each component of the recipe.

During development of C3, we have created a lot of recipes, and we now have also collected them into a cookbook. So if you're designing a Revit, or if you're sitting together with a customer using C3, you can use the cookbook to find the description of what the building part contains. All building elements within the same category have the same values for functional requirements, such as fire protection, heat transmission, and so on. This makes the different recipes in the same category comparable, like comparing apples and apples and not apples and pears.

The recipe has a key function in C3. They carry all the data, they are the basis for architects, and they are the link between all technical parts of the solution. So our goal was to not disturb the engineers and architects in the way of working, which is [? timing ?] in our regular tools, as I said before, and is Revit and then collaborate in BIM 360 or ACC.

We also created our own Revit template, where we have prepared commonly used families or recipes with a unique ID All recipes that we have created are stored in an isolated database at Sweco IT. The workflow is that, when we are done with our design, we save our model and then publish it to BIM 360 or ACC. Then, open up the model in a web window, which is based on Forge, or APS nowadays.

In the web window, you can change materials through recipes and compare different solutions. The outcome of carbon and cost will be presented in the viewer, and the technical solution and the methodology is universal and scalable. But the data on which the calculations are based on and the structure of the recipe are adapted to the Swedish market. And we will now try to demonstrate the tool for you.

KARIN HURTIG: Oh. Move out. So I will now present to you what C3 looks like on the web.

MATHIAS NALL: You open up Chrome, and you log in to C3. And the first thing you see is an instruction and information, a disclaimer that reminds you of what you can do and cannot do in the tool. And you open up the dropdown list, and all projects that you are involved in are now showing in the list.

Select your project, and at the same time, the model opens up. APS connects the model quantities to the database, and the calculations for this building is shown in the viewer, total carbon footprint and total cost for building. Karin will now demonstrate this for you.

KARIN HURTIG: Yes. So as I hope you can see here, we have the Revit model opened up in the web window, and this is just one of our regular projects. And this risk project you see here is from the west coast of Sweden, one of our clients called [? Riksbyggen. ?] And this is one of their pilot projects, where they really wanted to do a sustainable building, and they wanted to use C3 to try and optimize how to get it as sustainable as possible.

And as Mathias said, on the left-hand side here, you can see those two columns showing the total cost and carbon footprint for the building, and down here, you can see the numbers for that. And in this case this is in Swedish [? krona ?] since it is the Swedish data that we're working with here. And if we now want you to see what this building would be on carbon footprint, if it was in concrete instead, then we could use the elaborations in the tool.

So doing that, I just push up here and start a new elaboration, and now the tool is telling me that it had founded outdated recipes and that is why the model turns red. It's an alert for me to see that there are 2,235 components with outdated data. So when I press this button and say yes, I directly get an updated data for both cost and carbon emission for the building, because that's the idea, that C3 should follow the prices on the market. So you can always get as accurate data as possible from this.

And in this viewer, I can then mark some components in the building, and I can take them away to reach into other different components. And as I said, if this was to be concrete, I would go to the right, down here, marking this, and then selecting all the components of the same sort. And I go down to the right here on the list, and here I have a list of different recipes. That means the different components, in this case, the wall, outer walls, and I choose instead a concrete wall and change that. That is one way of changing stuff in the model, and the other way is to use this list of the components.

And I can go into this list as well and choose the floorings, and then I can choose, in this case, it is a flooring of cross-laminated timber. And I choose all these floorings, and then go back and I can change it to concrete again. And then find myself a concrete slab, and I change that one.

And in the same instance as I do this change, you can see on the left-hand side that these columns are changing. The black square in between of the front column is the original-- is the original model's value, and in the front, you can see the other one. And so I can continue and go into this project and change every component that we have listed in C3, but that takes some time.

And if I'm in a meeting with a client, I don't want to sit that. And in that case, you can prepare some elaborations and save them into lab sessions. And then you can open that later. And of course, I've done this for you, so you will have a look at this.

So in this case, you have the same model, the same project, and I have done some [? elaborations ?] to look at. And I've made one with steel structure, one with concrete, one that is called cheap. And that is because when I choose the different materials that I can change, on the right-hand side here, you see that I can choose from carbon dioxide, and I will get the list sorted from the least to the most carbon dioxide emission from this building part. And I can choose cost, and then it lists these different recipes from the building parts with the lowest cost down to the highest. And this way, I can choose what to focus on, and I can also show too the combinations.

And the last one is reuse material and also with a concrete structure with a concrete that have 20% less carbon emission than a standard concrete. And this is also to show you that we've used some reused material to be able to see what that does to the calculation. But now you want to-- you don't want to sit here and click back and forth to see what these different elaboration have for numbers. You want to see it compared.

So then you go to this Compare Lab button, and in an instant we get a visual view of the different elaboration and what the carbon emission and the cost for each elaboration is. So you see each of the elaborations we had in the other view, and what they're doing. And also down below here, you can see the different elaborations, and in the total cost and carbon emission and also per gross floor area square meter.

So you can also, in the right-hand side, go deeper into each [? elaboration ?] and see which components or building parts have the heaviest effect on both carbon and cost. So you get the percentage of how much of the total cost per square meter is from, for example, in this case, wall, and you can choose between the different elaborations and look at what is the best or worst that you can work with. And for an example, you can look at the reused material here. We have the elaboration, we reused material, and in this elaboration, I've used the reused brick for the facade.

So if we look at this elaboration down here, we can see that it has a total of 1,851 tons of carbon dioxide emission. But if I then go back to the window and go to this Reuse elaboration. And I pick the wall, and I select all of the wall. And I go back to choose the normal brick instead of the reused brick in the facade, and we changed.

We can go directly back then to our compared labs, and we can see what happened. And you see it went from 1,800 something to 1,990. So it's more than 100,000 kilograms of carbon emission that changes, when you just change to the reused brick.

And it's really interesting also to see how different things-- when you sit in a meeting and you can change things directly. And we really recommend to also look at the bigger picture and the system thinking of a building. For instance, a building is not only the building and material on top of the surface. You also have the foundation of the building.

And for an example I did this cheap building, but if I go back-- and we have this site from our client, and it turns out to be really muddy. And we need to have pillars down in the earth to make the construction safe and sound, and then I can change this foundation. Let's see. And then I change the foundation instead. So I have some pillars, and I still have a heavy structure.

And I change the recipe, and then again, we go back, and we look. And suddenly, you can see that sheep is not so cheap anymore, and the carbon dioxide emission is not really that fun to look at. So it's really, really important, and that is what we find C3 being really strong in. If you have a meeting with a client, bring some experts, like a structural engineer and an architect or someone really good at sustainability, and test this thing.

Maybe you can just move the building a bit on the side, and you won't have to do these pillars. And you will save lots of money and lots of carbon emission. And that is what we really think is the beautiful thing about C3, that it can give us an idea of what key issues to work with to make the biggest impact. And it's also a way to learn together, when you sit like this and discuss these different things together.

MATHIAS NALL: So now, we have seen the first-- or the third release of C3 from September this year. And we still have new features and functionalities being released in the future. To mention something, some new things from this year, we can also support IFC files now, which is a huge step for us.

We also develop new recipes. We also have a new business model. Today, C3 is a [? SaaS ?] solution, which means that you can buy a license for either the viewer or the viewer and the database base, which means that you can do your own elaborations back home in your office.

In the pipeline today, we also scale C3 into other Sweco countries. C3 today calculates on buildings, and the next step for expanding is city planning, and that is something that we call C3 for cities. We're also looking into C3 for industry or C3 refurbishment, which is a big thing in Europe right now, and also C3 for infrastructure.

KARIN HURTIG: And, well, there I am. Yeah. We do believe that, by linking digitalization and sustainability, we can raise the climate issue in projects more easily, and we can get a good base for decisions early on. And we would like to end this presentation with a reminder that it is time for action. The industry have the knowledge on how to reduce climate impact. Now, it is up to us to make it happen.

MATHIAS NALL: With small steps, we can all contribute to sustainable future. One of Sweco's steps forward is C3, Carbon Cost Compass. Thank you for listening.

KARIN HURTIG: Thank you.