Modern Methods of Construction: Using the Power of Informed Design for Sustainable Industrialized Construction

ALLAN CHALMERS: Welcome to modern methods of construction. In today's presentation, we're going to discuss how modern methods of construction are shaping the vision of sustainability through industrialized construction and how it's powered by Autodesk Informed Design.

And so just as a precursor, we've got our safe harbor statement. Some of the topics we will discuss are future-facing, and we don't want you to commit on those future-facing. So I'll leave this for ten seconds or so for you to have a quick browse through it. And then we'll move to the body of the presentation.

OK, Clair, let's move. Let's go. So, as I said, welcome. We're going to do introductions of ourselves and what modern methods of construction actually means. But we're going to describe the problem, the vision, the solution, and ultimately conclude with how informed design connects design and make. We hope you enjoy it. We hope you take something away from it. And we will be at the AU booth and would highly recommend that you come and visit us. So for those that are actually showing up at AU, come along. Clair.

So I'm Allan. I'm a senior business development executive with the Informed Design Incubation team at Autodesk. I'm in Brisbane, Australia, sunny Brisbane. I've been in the industry for-- let's cough a bit-- some 40 years, long enough to know that what we're doing next is really quite profound. I've worked in residential, commercial, offshore in the Middle East, done a whole plethora of different things. But I'm very happy to introduce you to Clair. And I'll let Clair introduce herself.

CLAIR STONE: Hi there, everyone. My name is Clair Stone. I'm a customer adoption specialist for Inform Design. I'm based here in the not always so sunny Portland, Oregon, here in the United States. My background is in architecture, and I've worked on a whole range of projects during my career, including performing arts, some educational work, multifamily residential, and institutional work. And I have been very excited to join the Informed Design team. I'm looking forward to seeing you all at our booth and really happy to be presenting alongside Allan.

And I did want to point out that today Allan and I are going to be wearing some very unique hats, each representing our respective industries. So as we go through the presentation, you will see these hats again, and you will hear us referring to ourselves and our roles and the industry along these lines. So I'll be representing AEC, Architecture, Engineering, And Construction. And Allan is wearing the PD&M hat today. All right, I'm going to hand it over to Allan with the next slide.

ALLAN CHALMERS: OK, many terms, one goal. There are a load of different terms in and around the industry, both the manufacturing side and the AEC industries. So we're going to try and demystify some of it by introducing modern methods of construction, which is an overarching term, interchanged in some cases with informed design, industrialized construction, et cetera.

But ultimately, it's around increasing efficiencies, introducing new methods. And in this presentation, we'll discuss quickly those methods of construction from the basis of a UK framework that was introduced some years ago. Clair, go forward.

So it's broadly linked to seven categories. And three key elements of those categories are where the operational happens. So we have MMC, multi category definitions supporting industrialized construction. So you can see systemized structural components leading towards additive manufacturing, away from traditional methodologies.

Then in the middle, we've got stuff that happens in site-led labor reduction activities, productivity improvements. And then we've got site process. So as we go towards, we'll cover in detail the presentation how these categories span across industrialized construction.

CLAIR STONE: So we are going to kick things off with defining the problem, these cycles of rework that exist within our industries, particularly within the industry that I am representing today, AEC. And for those of you who are familiar with our industries, these will not come as surprises to you.

So simply put, traditional construction practices can't keep pace with our growing needs. Traditional construction practices are labor-intensive, time-consuming, and inefficient. So we need a new way forward. Some of the issues that we're facing, we have this unmet global demand. So our population globally is increasing, and our rate of construction is not able to keep pace.

This is particularly relevant with housing. So we have this growing population and nowhere to house them. So in order to keep up with this pace, we're going to be needing to build something along the lines of 96,000 new homes every day to meet our 2050 population speculations.

In addition to increasing the number of units that we're building, we also need to make them more affordable so we can reach everybody across all income brackets. For those of you who have ever been on a job site, this will probably not be a surprising slide for you. We have poor sustainability practices throughout the construction process. So we've got major landfill waste, which makes sense if you think about raw materials being delivered to a job site, cut down, assembled. Most of those raw materials are not going to go into a building. Much of it is going to go straight into the landfill.

We are also facing some significant workforce challenges. So our workforce today is starting to age out of their working years without a strong backfill of new workers to fill the spaces that they are going to leave behind. So some of the challenges that we're going to be facing is upskilling new workers to pick up the load that our aging workforce is leaving behind.

We also need to be smarter about the skills that we're equipping that workforce to handle. So we need a workforce that is going to be smarter and more efficient and more productive to continue to fill our global needs.

This is an image that I really personally love. This is all of the parts and pieces of a Lustron house from shortly after the end of World War II in the United States. Lustron was a company that embodied many of our goals that we have for industrialized construction today. They had a vision to create premanufactured kit-of-parts homes that could be constructed rapidly across the US for very affordable prices.

And I bring this image up because I want to point out that these are not new ideas. Industrialized construction is an idea that has existed for a long time, at least a hundred years. And I think it's important to bring up these older examples because, in many ways, they present a microcosm for the challenges that our industry has been facing over the last hundred years. And everything that we saw occur with this company Lustron failing has set the tone for our last hundred years of construction.

And I'm going to go through some of those particular issues that we've seen. So we've got high production costs. We've got more complex buildings. We've got disparate supply chains. All of these things are increasing the scope of construction. They are making buildings more complicated to build and more costly. And as we go through the decades, all of these issues start to compound on one another.

We end up with siloed project partners that aren't communicating well. This leads to inefficient coordination. This lack of coordination leads to incomplete information. And finally, of course, higher costs. And so at this point, that vision of industrialized construction and quick, cheap, premanufactured homes is starting to get obscured.

And as we look at where we are today, all of these have compounded towards more rework, more stress, and more waste, almost completely obscuring that vision of the future that the Lustron home represented.

So now for a bit of drama, we fade to black. And the question is, where do we go from here? Well, newsflash, I am excited to say that there are solutions that are happening right now. And Allan and I are going to talk through them today.

This project on the screen is a project that was done by WSP. This is an airport project that was recently done. This is what I see as the modern-day kit of parts solution. Each of these color-coded panels represent a component that has been completely modeled out using Autodesk Inventor. So each of these kit of parts can come together and be assembled and ready to construct in a fully assembled, fully manufacturable fashion.

This also allows WSP to manage an accurate manufacturing-based bill of materials and a kit of parts.

This next slide, which was provided also by WSP, I think does a really good job of introducing an idea that we call left shift. So currently, through the design process, as it happens, most of the high-impact, high-cost changes and issues that come up in a project happen towards the end. This is because you're starting a project with incomplete information, a lack of chosen building materials or manufacturers, and all of this kind of compounds over time into a lower-quality product and a higher-cost building.

So you can see in this diagram, if we move all of those different choices towards the front of the project, this left shift, moving towards the left of our timeline, we're going to see a cascade of positive effects as you move down the line. So by choosing manufacturable parts earlier on, you're going to see better efficiencies, better innovation, lower costs, and ultimately a better product delivered for the customer.

I'm going to let Allan talk a little bit more about this idea of left shift and how it relates to industrialized construction. So turning it over to Allan right now.

ALLAN CHALMERS: Thank you. So that leads us to the vision, the impact in the industry, Where next? What are we doing as Autodesk? How are we showing up in the marketplace? Go, Clair.

OK, so we're going to go through industrialized construction as a definition. So it's really bringing the capabilities of the manufacturing environment, the principles, repeatability, long-term scaling to the front, to that left shift.

So a methodology in prefab of physicality being provided and fabricated away from the job site is essentially the first of those pillars. Next pillar is a shift towards a thinking. So instead of having a look at one single project, we're now looking-- and the examples that you saw Clair show with the WSP airport module is also on show at the demonstration at AU on the connection in the main stands.

We are looking at how productization moves towards repeatable configurable kit of parts. And then, with that, you can exercise DfMA rule-based building design processes that connect the data, connect and improve it over a timeline. We are looking now to introduce rules-based design to customize and work to optioneer, to ultimately configure buildings at scale.

And we've seen that with the WSP. And that leads you to a methodology called industrialized construction or productizing DfMA, connecting to the design and make.

All right, so connected process enables transformation. We're mapping to show how this works when we start to connect. So the next portion of what we're doing is saying that these processes are not linear. Prefabrication enables productization, and it informs DfMA and drives prefabrication.

So we're saying that in a world where we move towards productization, we end up with a circular, not linear process, moving from productization configuration and then recycling that learning through so that the knowledge and the data can be carried across our platform to increase predictability and outcomes.

So if you look at mapping this workflow, this diagram shows the three segments of the market. And what we're currently working towards as a team is looking at our AEC tools, looking at the manufacturing space, and looking how through the platform of ACC, we have a connected link between the three.

So AEC to manufacturing, in the past, traditionally we have limited capability in form design, which we're going to go through shortly. We'll show you how we're starting to connect those services together. So the products can be defined and cataloged. They can move across this timeline from defining, discovering, having use in the building design environment, then out to manufacture, and ultimately, the notion of assembling with that kit of parts.

So we're working towards a unique opportunity, and that unique opportunity is connecting this for purpose for our customers, making sure that they get high value from both our PD&C collections, our platform, our AEC collection, and beyond as we build on this platform.

So we have the wonderful Green Canopy Node working with us. We have been working with them for several years now. Benjamin Hall and Abby Willetts, wonderful people. And what they have is the personas. So when you look at where we started, and Clare and I showed our personas at the beginning, I'm wearing, in this case, the D&M hat. Benjamin's wearing the AEC hat. So we've sort of got a swap around here.

But ultimately, what Green Canopy Node have been doing is embracing the concept of productization, breaking down modular components and making small subsets for purpose, repeatability, and then publishing them with Informed Design to gain maximum advantage going forward in recycling, reuse, and efficiencies of drawings and sustainable outcomes.

Similarly, we've got the wonderful John Fay and his Lada Cube group. We can see some fairly compelling numbers here. Lada Cube are building tech company. They have a notion of this methodology in the framing system is the replacement for the 2-by-4. And you can see from 270 hours down to 2. We're looking at a family kit of parts. We're looking at presenting how this is sped up with Informed Design, how it's enabled to reduce the design hours, to reduce the level of documentation, and where we can repeat over the top and scale towards artificial intelligence in the future, taking the heavy lift out of mapping through.

And again, for those that are lucky enough to come to AU, we will have some presentations around the work that we've been doing with Lada Cube. I would encourage you to seek those out. My colleague Andy Akenson is doing those classes.

We then move on to Belcanto in New Zealand, who, again, are a small business, challenging the norm.

In an innovative way, they're connecting building design by early in the tender phases, getting involved and supplying accurate Inventor-based models to the market so that they can win the work earlier and look towards how they can future productize that offering to enable quick turnaround and working toward accurate quotations, streamlined process, and speed to market with their customers so that their customers can move rapidly rather than be bogged down in the tender phases. Clair.

CLAIR STONE: Thank you, Allan. OK, so you've heard us talk a lot about industrialized construction, productization. But you may be wondering, how does that apply to me? How can I start to incorporate those new practices into my everyday work? And that is where Autodesk comes in with a solution. It is Autodesk Informed Design, Connect, Design and Make.

This is the Autodesk effort to allow every user to start to integrate ideas of productization and industrialized construction into their everyday work. So at its core, industrialized construction is intended to increase sustainability by reducing the time and material resources involved across the industries working to construct the built environment.

Informed Design is the tool that's being used to streamline the design process and to make it more efficient, less wasteful, with better outcomes. And we can finally curb those endless cycles of rework.

So a typical project timeline fits in pretty specific boxes-- planning first, designing next, build, and then operate. Unfortunately, these phases of a project cycle are relatively siloed, so you move from one to the other in a pretty linear format. As we mentioned earlier, you can get into problems when what you've planned in the building phase turns out not to work.

That's where you start to run into these cycles of rework, where you have to step back two phases and design and plan and build again. What we're trying to do with Informed Design is introduce this idea of productization into your process. So building products are created by a manufacturer and can be integrated into a design project right off the bat, during the planning phase.

And there's some really significant downstream effects to this idea of productization. So when a manufacturer defines these components and hands them over to a designer to incorporate them into their designs at the beginning of a process, there's a streamline effect where big decisions are made earlier. It makes the building process go smoother. You're not having to answer RFIs. You're not having to sift through cut sheets. You know exactly what you're going to build with right when you start the project.

And ultimately, this is going to result in a more complete and more accurate project that's delivered on time and on budget.

So I'm just going to identify each of the personas that are associated with these blocks. We're going to refer back to these in a moment, so I want to make sure that they're fresh in your mind. So the persona responsible for productizing or building products is the product engineer. You can call this person whatever you want, but for our case, this is a product engineer. The architect or designer is responsible for planning and design. The general contractor will design and build. Fabricator and subcontractor will also design and build. And then the owner and operator will operate at the end of the project.

As you know, Allan and I have our hats on, so Allan is going to represent the product engineer. I'm going to represent the architect and designer. So how does Informed Design actually work? Informed Design is essentially a three-part process. It begins with the product engineer and inventor. The product engineer is crafting a manufacturable model, so they've got all of the nuts and bolts included. They can include smart parameters and basically make a fully manufacturable part.

Next up is the designer. This person is likely going to be working in Revit. The designer is going to have access through the Informed Design add-in to the component that the product engineer has made. The product engineer is able to control the constraints that the designer is going to have access to. So if the product engineer wants to give you access within certain boundaries, they can set those up so that the designer isn't going to use a component that is outside the manufacturable boundaries.

Finally, once the designer has placed this component in their building model, perhaps it's been customized specifically to fit this building, but it meets all of the needs that the manufacturer has outlined, the last step is going to be in the web application, the Informed Design web application.

Here, a production engineer or a similar role on your team is going to be able to automatically generate outputs for that specific piece that has been added to your Revit model. So you can automatically output bills of materials, various 3D files, PDFs, drawings, lots of different options depending on what the product engineer has baked into that model in Inventor. And these are going to be accessible at the click of the button within the web application. And it matches exactly the parameters that the designer has specified within Revit.

Yet again, our hats appear. So we have Allan, who's going to be representing our Inventor workflow, and myself, who's going to be representing the Revit workflow. And we're going to walk through it in a little more detail right now.

ALLAN CHALMERS: So thank you, Clair. Let's have a bit of fun here. I'm wearing my-- well, sort of wearing my PDM hat. So I'm going to walk through the inventor side. But we're talking about authoring a CAD output from the manufacturing side. Inventor happens to be the design tool we've gone first with here at Autodesk.

So from Informed Design, from a manufacturing approach, I can infuse this product with rich information specifications. And what you're seeing on the screen is the three different elements of that screen from the Inventor point of view. So the main Inventor stair is in the Stock Standard screen.

The form in the middle is me preparing and getting ready to publish, as Clair will show, the form up to the Revit audience. But most importantly, it's a digital representation of the product. That product is going to be authored by the product engineer to hold the representation and the constraints. So in some cases, it may be very simplistic. It might even be static. In other cases, it will be flexible. It will have dimensional control. It will have color, maybe different types of stairs, different configurations of height, et cetera.

But all of those outcomes are steered by the product engineer. And they are all going to be in control of being manufactured. And there's also an aspect of directly targeting through our platform, offering this product up to a particular project for purpose. So we're starting with rich information that's going to then be instantiated into and onto the platform in the form of Revit, which Clair will work through.

And this gives you a bridge to gap between the design and manufacturing environments. And as you saw with both Abby and Benjamin wearing those hats, this is a great example of a new collaborative approach between parties that have traditionally been not very good at or been unable to communicate effectively. So as we pass to the architect, I'll let Clair now show you what that looks like once she receives the information from myself of the manufacturing information. And off we go from here.

CLAIR STONE: Yes. So as Allan mentioned, this is a pretty unique relationship that is made possible by Informed Design. As a designer, typically, I wouldn't really interact with Allan very much in a traditional design-bid-build environment. I wouldn't really have much access to the manufacturer or defining what product is going to go into my model. Informed Design really puts that on its head. So I'm able to get Allan's manufacturable product into my model right off the bat.

I wanted to use the stairs example in particular because I've been on projects where my entire job in the project was stairs, detailing stairs, dimensioning stairs, months and months of stairs, when I would rather have spent my time designing, creating beautiful spaces, doing more than just dimensions and minute details.

Informed Design really opens the door to make that possible. So as I'm working in Revit, I can open the Informed Design add-in. It lives at the top of my ribbon, similar to any other Revit add-in. And it's going to open a separate dialog box. From that dialog box, I can access the project folder that Allan has saved his component into. And I can open that component. And I have the ability to customize this staircase within the constraints that Allan has defined.

So in some instances, if I'm working with a manufacturer who really has a one size fits all product, there's not going to be much for me to customize. I'll bring it in as more or less a static product. However, that static product is still going to have all of the rich metadata that I really can't get otherwise. So it's all coming in from Allan directly.

And in this case, with the staircase, Allan has built in quite a few different parameters that I can control-- height, width, material finish. I can make all of these selections to essentially create a customized staircase within my project that meets all of the needs and all of the preferences for my design team and my client.

Once I've made all of these selections, I create what's called a variant. This is the customized version of the model that Allan has created. And I place them into my Revit model, very similar to any other Revit family. Revit, in fact, is going to read it as a typical RFA family.

What's unique about the RFA family coming from Informed Design is that Allan can also build in some controls that allow me to change the level of detail. So I have heard from Autodesk customers all the time that they're constantly bogged down by old or heavy Revit families that they're pulling in from who knows where, maybe their firm's company website, maybe a manufacturer's website, maybe another project, and they see some real big performance issues come from that practice.

Informed Design ensures that you have the latest model exactly the way that you want it, in a way that fits best for your project. And from there, once I've included it in my project, I can continue working as normal. If the manufacturer creates an update, I can get a notification that that update has occurred and edit the instance or replace it with the latest and greatest.

And then I continue on with my project as usual. And I don't have to worry about down the line running into issues with reviewing cut sheets or having to answer RFIs for a product that I haven't selected yet. I find that pretty magical.

But what's perhaps more magical is the last step of the project of the process. So this is generating outputs through the Informed Design web application. As I mentioned previously, the web application gives me access to all of the rich automated data that Allan has built into the product, the stair, in this instance.

Allan, for me, has turned on a bill of materials, a SAP file, a STEP file, DWGs, PDF drawings. There's a whole list shown on the screen here. And you can customize that list with Inform Design for Inventor. So I can select as many of these outputs as I want as the project partner here and automatically generate those materials that are specific to the customized piece that I place into my Revit model.

This quickly automates all of the fabrication details that otherwise I would be hunting down during the construction administration process. And I think this is really where the magic starts to happen with the powerful automation that Informed Design offers.

All right, so we've walked you through the Informed Design product. We've talked about the three-part steps, Inventor, Revit, and the web application. But there's still so much more to do. This is a very new product. It was just released in February of 2024, and it continues to evolve. So we want to be looking ahead at what's going to happen in the next year, in the next five years, in the next 10 years. And I'm going to hand it over to Allan to give us a look at what's on the horizon.

ALLAN CHALMERS: Thank you. And the excitement is aplenty. For the first time and through those slides, we've shown modern methods of construction, industrialized construction coming to the forefront. And as pointed out, it's not something that's happening in the distance. Our customers are doing it now. So we're very grateful to our customers who have gone early with us, gone through beta, and now through our commercial launch.

We're excited, as AU approaches, we will make some future-facing announcements, show roadmaps, and, more importantly, look at how our Informed Design product sits with its programming interfaces on our platform so that our customers can start to work, use the tool to configure arrangements that will serve them for efficiency, sustainability, and point them towards artificial intelligence as we go forward.

So we've hopefully shown you a couple of real world stories. We're very grateful to our customers as we are to WSP for sharing some of the next slides I'm about to show. And we look forward to having customers feed ideas, interest, but most importantly, getting involved in the product, producing outputs, testing it, pushing it, and using it to get further ahead.

And I think Clair's example of the stairs in her project work and sitting there for months churning out the same things, with what we've just shown you, that simple one piece can take out the people waste, add to the sustainability, and hopefully make the process better connected in the future and more value for those participants. So the engineering people that are involved and obviously the architectural people doing the roles that they studied to do rather than doing a lot of repetitious work, that's a high load on them and low value to the business.

So moving on, I'm going to go through what WSP have achieved. And Dale Sinclair, who's the head of digital innovation at WSP in London, has kindly shared these slides and quickly explained as slides, as you go through here-- Clair, just forward them for me. I'm not going to talk too long to them. But what you see is a plethora of activity, of connected activity with a central digital twin being evolved as a product base.

Now, we've spoken loosely about evaluating sustainability, productizing, collating information, and securing across a timeline improvements that the manufacturing community have done for a long, long time. So taking away this notion of single delivery project and moving it up to productization and holistic lifecycle of product, manufactured product showing up inside an architectural environment.

So that means that we can aim at programs of work. We can go towards leaning into net zero and looking at new materials that come from manufacturing bases and surfacing those into architectural projects. Once we have a productization base solidly in play, we can build the large learning models. We can lean into artificial intelligence.

And you'll see some of that with our partners on the stand at some of the presentations at AU and obviously in the recordings. But they all go towards industrialized construction, taking some of the work away from site and placing it into different places where it's better accessed and better delivered for the purpose of all of the sustainability and the modern methods of construction.

I would encourage you to research. The parting comment that I will make is this is not something you have to do all at once. You can break this down. You can structure it from small, as you saw us talk to the stairs. You can do static content. We're working on that furiously at the moment, and we'll be releasing that shortly.

It's important that you look at how this all fits together in the context of architectural fit out and then look at the advantages of manufacturing involving informing that process with certainty. And with that, I will pass back to Clair to show the next slide. We've got a futures briefing. Ryan McMahon, who is the General Manager of Autodesk Informed Design, will be talking today for those people on the today for the Autodesk University.

CLAIR STONE: October 17. Thursday, October 17.

ALLAN CHALMERS: Yes. So again, if anyone is able to be there, I would highly suggest that futures briefing will contain our thinking, our strategic ideas, and how we will deliver to platform and to our customers to improve their net value of the portfolios of Autodesk products that they already use.

So our call to action here is really quite simple. We showed product design and manufacturing collection. We showed the AEC collection. And what we've done is we've added informed design into the manage.autodesk.com as part of the subscription. So customers who are already working using manage.autodesk.com can go and access as-is in the middle image there through that access button, leading you to the Informed Design web page, where Clair has kindly put 2's and 3's on there to show both of the add-ins.

One is for Inventor. One is for Revit. You can download those and start using them straight out of the gate. Equally, the third portion is the web portal. Again, it's there. Autodesk have kindly housed it on the main website, and you can go to the generating from that site, the outputs that Clair walked you through before. So with that, I think I'd like to thank you for your time. And I'll pass it back to Clair for final comments.

CLAIR STONE: Thank you. Thanks, Allan. Yes, I think what's really clever and exciting about Informed Design is that it integrates into all of the Autodesk software that you know and love, so Inventor and Revit. It's using our ACC Docs technology to connect all of these different players together. And once you have your existing subscription set up, they're instantly available to you. So you can go ahead and download these today and start using informed design and see what you can make.

And again, we encourage all of you to complete the workflow. So publish from Inventor, place into Revit, and then generate outputs on the web application. My job is to connect with customers regarding Informed Design, so I will be in your inboxes connecting with you, finding out how it went. So this probably won't be the last time that you hear from me.

But if you do want to continue to stay connected, I will just put up this screen really quickly so you can stay up to speed with all of our insights, access our exclusive content, and be the first to learn about product updates. We have a monthly newsletter. We have so many things going on. As I mentioned before, this is a new product. February 2024 is when it was launched. We are constantly making improvements.

And what's really exciting for our customers about interfacing with a product at this time in its lifecycle is that you'll really never be closer to the product team than you can be right now. So all of your feedback is taken directly into consideration. If you reach out to me, I'm a click away from our product team, and we really want to hear feedback from our customers.

We want to hear about people who are using the product, who have ideas. We want this to be a continuous feedback loop. And I am excited to hear from all of you. And with that, I will close out on our presentation here at AU 2024. We are excited to see you all in San Diego. Thank you so much.