Hi there,

Most practices are not short of data. The difficulty is that it rarely reaches the person making a decision in a form they can use, at the moment they need it. That is the thread through this week's issue, first in a white paper we have published with Epic Games and then in my conversation with Angelos Chronis about climate simulation that now runs in seconds inside the design tools architects already use.

The detail from the paper that I keep coming back to is from Argonne National Laboratory, where much of the work on a live digital twin went into turning more than 5,000 model elements into 220 sensor-linked zones, each checked against engineering drawings, before any sensor data could be placed in the right location. Geometry travels well from one tool to the next, but its meaning has to be rebuilt.

Below you will find the paper, the interview, two new tools in the database, three events on 15 October (I am speaking at one of them), a short research survey and a computational design role at BeeGraphy.

Let's get into it. 👇

The ADDD Workshop: a practical starting point for AI and technology decisions

The Workshop is a focused half-day session, held in person or online with your team, that looks at where technology and AI can help your practice and where they are currently causing friction. We begin by talking through how your team actually works, from early design through to delivery, so that the conversation is grounded in your real workflows rather than in a generic view of what a practice should be doing. From there we go through practical examples of tools that are relevant to your discipline, which gives everyone a shared and realistic picture of what is available and what is worth paying attention to.

I have been running workshops for Orms, Haworth Tompkins, Levitt Bernstein, DMWR, EPR and Morris & Co.

Within the session we identify the main problems holding the practice back, agree on which opportunities are worth pursuing first, and talk openly about the cost of leaving things as they are. Within a few days you receive a written report that sets out the key findings, the priorities and the recommended next steps, so the discussion turns into something you can act on and share with the wider team or the partners.

The Workshop is intended to give you strategic clarity, and it is not a technical audit of your systems. It works well as a first step for practices that know their tools and processes need attention but are not yet sure where to begin, and it can lead on to deeper work such as a early stage workflow software, Technology Blueprint or ongoing advisory support if that turns out to be useful.

Book a call here: 30 min with Allister Lewis

A PhD researcher at UNSW is studying how design firms capture and reuse project knowledge, and has asked whether ADDDitive readers would complete a ten-minute survey. All responses are anonymised, so no individual or firm is identified in the findings. If you leave your email at the end, you will receive the finished report on current knowledge capture practice across AEC firms, covering benchmarks, the common gaps and what the top-performing firms are doing differently. The more practices that take part, the more useful those benchmarks will be.

Take the survey: How design firms capture and reuse project knowledge

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Everything in this issue comes back to the same point, which is that the value of project information depends on who can use it and when. At Argonne, the geometry moved across without much trouble but the model only became useful once someone had rebuilt what each part of it meant, zone by zone, and checked it against the drawings.

With infrared.city, the analysis itself is not new but moving it from a specialist check at the end of a stage into the design tool while the massing is still changing alters which decisions it can influence. Two new tools make the same move on a smaller scale, with Foveate putting drawings, renders and models in front of a client in one place, and Kasper putting cost and carbon information in front of the person choosing the material. In each case the gain comes from shortening the distance between the information and the decision, rather than from producing more information.

The practical step is to pick one recurring decision on a live project, such as a façade material, a massing change or a wind comfort question on a public space, and trace it back. Write down where the information behind that decision comes from, how long it takes to arrive, what has to be converted or re-entered along the way, and who actually sees it before the decision is made. Wherever meaning is being rebuilt by hand, or the answer arrives after the design has moved on, that is where a tool or a workflow change will pay back first, and where it is worth testing against the software you already pay for before buying anything new. If you would rather work through that with someone in the room, that is what the half-day workshop below is for.

Get in touch - reply to this email or book a call: 30 min with Allister Lewis