Q&A: A BIM Tool for Early Concept Design

As BIM technology continues to reinvent the construction industry wheel, Introspective Systems has come up with technologies to enhance the early concept design phase of a construction project. Simplexity Launch is an early design decision tool that is still in the beta phase and expected to launch in October. Simplexity Informed Design — to launch in spring 2014 — validates the information collected in Simplexity Launch and links it to existing BIM tools. Green Building News spoke with Paul Bierman-Lytle, AIA USGBC, LEED AP, CEO of Introspective Systems, about the upcoming tools and what they mean for the green building industry.

Q: How does this technology differ from other software solutions out on the market?

Bierman-Lytle: We’ve discovered that we’ve left the middle ages and entered a renaissance with these BIM tools. Architects can get a lot of their designs done quickly with few mistakes, but what we’ve seen missing is the early concept automation tools. Our product is the pre-BIM tool for the client to use when they’re looking at budget, projects, parameters and what kind of targets they want to set. It’s a three-dimensional tool, opposed to most architecture programming tools, which are basically spreadsheets. Ours is very much in keeping with BIM tools and offers traceability of when decisions are made and who made them so nothing gets lost. It’s a huge data management tool. At the beginning of a project, there is a mammoth amount of data from federal regulations to climate issues to the client’s checklist of what they want out of the project. That huge amount of data has to be managed somehow so people can use it effectively. I haven’t found anything comparable to it in the industry right now.

Q: Why are the early design stages the most important in terms of incorporating a holistic approach into the project?

Bierman-Lytle: This is where you either make or break your budget. You make decisions at this stage that impact the project from thereon, especially when it comes to sustainability. Many [LEED] credits cannot be achieved if they’re not done accurately. I often come into a project way too late and have to tell clients that unfortunately they can’t achieve certain credits because they didn’t make those decisions early on in the process. It’s about helping the client select the wheel, not trying to reinvent the wheel. If they don’t make good decisions up front, then change orders will plague the project from the beginning to the end and that means higher costs to the client, time delays and losing the ability to gain credits.

Q: How does the technology incorporate green building techniques?

Bierman-Lytle: The [Simplexity Launch] tool is a way for [the project team] to ask the right questions at the early stages and test the validity of those questions. If the client is asking for a sustainability project, this encourages them to try the holistic approach. LEED certification requires a lot of credits that can be achieved in site selection. The tool can help determine where the project should be located, if you should keep trees or cut them down and the orientation of the building. It’s a tool that lays the roadmap out. Once you understand where you’re headed in the forest, then you go into our second tool, the informed design tool, and that starts validating or testing the assumptions you made in the first tool.

What’s missing right now is a client knows what they want and goes to a design firm to create an architectural plan; then they go to a sustainability consultant to make sure they’re heading in the right direction, but our view point is that this is still too late. You need to put together an integrated design team up front with the client to start questioning the validity of where the client’s headed so you don’t come up with assumptions and start testing them later and find out you were wrong. Often times clients will change their mind about a project after they see the schematic design; that automatically shows you something went wrong and there wasn’t a phase where assumptions were tested.

Q: What major design companies have used the technology and what projects has it been used on?

Bierman-Lytle: A few in the local region. Other companies that we’re requesting beta testing from and to give us feedback are HOK, Walt Disney Engineering and Skanska. We’re looking for feedback from fairly significant organizations to see how they would respond to the value and if it’s valuable or not, and if not how to make it better.

We hope to eventually introduce the tool to USGBC, which just came out with v4. As part of the health care credit, they have a credit related to an integrated design team. This tool should be valuable in getting that particular credit and should help a client get more credits overall. It will help them see up front what is achievable and what’s not and if not how to change that.

Q: What can architects learn from this tool?

Bierman-Lytle: One of the things we did in our research is we discovered that sometimes architects lose commission on their projects because of lack of communication or understanding what the client wanted. So this tool is something they can put in their tool belt when they approach the client to demonstrate that there’s a capability of analyzing a project and tracing where decisions are made, allowing for less misinterpretation.

I also talked to an architect that thought it could be a new line of business for him, of being an overall project manager or client’s representative. This tool would be the ideal vehicle by which he could manage the project from concept with the client all the way to turning over the project for operations. In fact at the AIA Convention 2013 in Denver, the theme for 2013 and 2014 is repositioning architects in the marketplace and finding new ways to generate revenue. This could be kind of a BIM tool for architects as client representatives, allowing them to manage a project from concept to the end.