Technologist
The following statement keeps me very busy: “The Tech Industry has yet to really understand AEC.”
For two decades, an obscene amount of VC capital has been available to the AEC industry for creating new tools, processes, workflows, or marketplaces — but we have yet to see the innovation that has rocked the transportation, telecommunications, or space industries.
Why? Because we have a fundamentally different relationship with our data. The Site of Calculation* for most architects, engineers, and builders has always been far too removed. The costs to simply engage project data has always required far too much interpretation and prior knowledge.
Matt Ford and I briefly sketched a path to meaningful AEC innovation in our 2016 paper “Simulating Paradoxes.” Therein lies a base idea — describing how the interpretative tropes of orthography, scale, and perspective have dominated spatial calculations for centuries. The document shows how new computation-based, time-based models are side-stepping these limits, and already bringing important new possibilities into view.
I’m detailing a more complete path to significant change in the AEC industry in an upcoming book: Spatial Knowledge, and Its Production. Therein, the problem of this kind of Representational thinking is elaborated, the limits of Representational technologies are defined, and break-away uses of simulations are case-studied.
Exploring this framework guided my graduate research at Yale, where I began coding digital tools for architects. Those tools were later elaborated with the help of a MacDowell Colony Fellowship and NYIT ISRC Grants.
Unraveling this awareness has provided the roadmap for my practice, where I lead the modeling efforts on some of the first BIM-mandated projects for the federal government, and guided many other designers to realize the kinds of projects they never could imagine, before.
Sharing this insight has guided my consulting, where I started by helping tons of architecture firms adopt BIM- and VDC-base workflows, and have since grown to help teams pivot in some of the biggest construction and manufacturing firms in North America.
For two decades, an obscene amount of VC capital has been available to the AEC industry for creating new tools, processes, workflows, or marketplaces — but we have yet to see the innovation that has rocked the transportation, telecommunications, or space industries.
Why? Because we have a fundamentally different relationship with our data. The Site of Calculation* for most architects, engineers, and builders has always been far too removed. The costs to simply engage project data has always required far too much interpretation and prior knowledge.
Matt Ford and I briefly sketched a path to meaningful AEC innovation in our 2016 paper “Simulating Paradoxes.” Therein lies a base idea — describing how the interpretative tropes of orthography, scale, and perspective have dominated spatial calculations for centuries. The document shows how new computation-based, time-based models are side-stepping these limits, and already bringing important new possibilities into view.
I’m detailing a more complete path to significant change in the AEC industry in an upcoming book: Spatial Knowledge, and Its Production. Therein, the problem of this kind of Representational thinking is elaborated, the limits of Representational technologies are defined, and break-away uses of simulations are case-studied.
Exploring this framework guided my graduate research at Yale, where I began coding digital tools for architects. Those tools were later elaborated with the help of a MacDowell Colony Fellowship and NYIT ISRC Grants.
Unraveling this awareness has provided the roadmap for my practice, where I lead the modeling efforts on some of the first BIM-mandated projects for the federal government, and guided many other designers to realize the kinds of projects they never could imagine, before.
Sharing this insight has guided my consulting, where I started by helping tons of architecture firms adopt BIM- and VDC-base workflows, and have since grown to help teams pivot in some of the biggest construction and manufacturing firms in North America.
