A few years ago Jon Morgan, our Building Physics leader in Australasia, made the following slide to illustrate just how many different software analysis tools his team uses on a regular basis. When you multiply that across all the services a firm like ours offers that is a lot of software.

Specialists need specialist tools and sometimes software doesn’t cut it. Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) has its place but it isn’t about to replace wind tunnel testing. DesignLink, which is open via a collaboration agreement, is one of the ways we address how to shift and manage data across projects.

With all this in mind, we have created Submerge to visualise multiple analysis results that are generated on projects in the one space. Large multi-disciplinary projects create huge datasets and we have been expending research and development effort to combine this data and create richer spaces for design navigation. The aim with so many disciplines is to clearly tell the story of an emergent design and Submerge is a data visualization tool that integrates the datasets into one 3D environment, providing an immersive and interactive presentation experience.

Above: Geometry and CFD analysis

Rather than presenting images from various analysis tools, we can now walk through the design with people and cars moving, or with the wind blowing as predicted by separate analysis programs.

The above image shows geometry (from Rhino via Grasshopper), wind streamlines (from CFD), structural analysis (from GSA) and Pedestrian analysis (from MassMotion) in the one 3D environment.

We have made it possible to publish the content so others can wander through in their own time and on their own computer. There is more work to do in 2012 with navigation, testing physical spaces for Submerge projection – our SoundLabs would be great – and playing with more controllers like the  Kinect. All good fun and its been nice to see client reaction to Submerge over the last few months.

We just ran Arup Design School for Australasia. It has its own website http://www.arup.com.au/designschool/

Andrew

Following last year’s Arup film and animation short course, The Impossible Dynamic City, we have just held a follow up workshop at the Victorian College of the Arts. This year we had younger staff from the Singapore, Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne offices at the VCA over two days. They immersed themselves in storytelling techniques using film and animation with Paul Fletcher and Robert Stephenson at VCA School of Film & Television.

The 2011 State of Design Festival opened in Melbourne on Wednesday 20th July and this year Arup is presenting The Invisible Landscape.

The Invisible Landscape is a project to source people’s stories about the city’s green infrastructure so that we can build a broad picture of how the community values the the city’s green spaces.

Using the website people can share thoughts, comments, information and images about the city’s landscape, discover other people’s secret green gems, or even reveal locations that could be improved to enhance the liveability of the city.

All of this is also available for the iPhone through a web app. Just navigate to The Invisible Landscape to launch the app. People be able to upload comments, information and images about their favourite green spaces around our city.

We tested the app with a guided ‘walk-shop’ along the Yarra River last Saturday to be among the first to use the Invisible Landscape app.  Participants will be able to upload comments, information and images about their favourite green spaces around our city.

Thanks to Gail Hall (Urban Landscapes, City of Melbourne), Marissa Powell
(Community Consultation, Arup), and Dan Koerner (Plot Media)

Visit The Invisible Landscape and upload your images and stories. Short code  http://aru.ps/TIL

Follow the project on Twitter @cityinvisible and Facebook.

Its a wrap for this year and what a year it has been. On Thursday9th December Arup held a workshop at the Victorian Space Science Education Centre (VSSEC) with VSSEC and Engineers Australia. We explored and imagined the potential for this facility to become both an educational and industry facility for concurrent design.

Many thanks to Mark Burry from SIAL, Peter Raisbeck from Uni Melb and Agustin Chevez from Geyer who all have interests in the area and with whom we look forward to continuing to work with in 2011. More in the new year, but needless to say the workshop built on the work we did during the year on digital technologies and new forms of procurement.

There will be plenty of posts to come in early 2011 that will explain what follows and more. As I look over the projects Digital Innovation has worked on this year, I don’t think I could have predicted either the breadth or the number. Just a scratching the surface here… we’ve developed iPad apps (as an Apple Enterprise Developer) in Brisbane, we’re in the cloud – the Amazon Cloud – with our GIS+ work in Perth. Interactive Reports really took off and made their way around the region and client feedback has been brilliant. From Sydney there will be posts on what we’ve done with the Makerbot printing as well as how we are using Microsoft’s Kinetic. In Melbourne we’ve been doing some very cool work in Grasshopper and the Melbourne Office Realtime will make its debut early in the New Year. The animation workshop we did with the VCA has spawned nascent film makers around the firm. Thanks also to Hassell for the feedback!

We’ve won some interesting ARC Linkage grants and I think they ought to have their own pages devoted to the work, which brings me to the site.  In 2011 there will be a revamp to include our design work. Digital Innovation has been literally embedded in some groups and Melbourne Buildings called theirs Design and Digital Innovation. Led by John Bahoric, they are regularly meeting, sharing work and including clients. This broadening of the DI project goes hand-in-hand with intentions of the firm and the site’s content and layout will reflect that.

Thanks to those we have worked with during the year. Thanks to the team and all those in Arup who contribute. Digital Innovation sits at the front end of our projects, surfing the wave. It couldn’t happen without the support of the firm’s leadership, the Australian Regional Board and in particular Peter Bowtell, our Australasian Buildings Leader and Chris Graham, our Chief Operating Officer.

I scrawled a note during the last summer break “2010 – data; mobile and visualisation” and now I’m off to scrawl some more. All the best for the New Year.

Andrew

The Impossible Dynamic City is a sequence of animations from a short course developed with the Film and Animation School at the Victorian College of the Arts. The idea behind the course is to expand the skills we use when communicating our designs and our thinking.

Ten Arup staff attended the inaugural course which was held over two consecutive Fridays in September. During the first day we focussed on developmental and exploratory exercises, impulsive thoughts and random ideas reacting to materials and sound on the animation stages.

There was an introduction to resources and techniques through ‘making’ and the theme was to ‘animate the inanimate’. Each person brought something personal along to breathe life into. Amongst the objects were rocks, phones and workshop tools.

Then, individually or in pairs, the participants wrote an idea around the The Impossible Dynamic City theme to pursue on the second day.

Those animations, brought together in the video below are experimental in nature, but they demonstrate a desire to ensure that our expertise is communicated in a meaningful and engaging way.

This is the site of the UCSF Medical Center at Mission Bay in San Francisco. The contractors have been there for over a year and there’s not much to show for it on the ground. That is because since April 2009 the client, contractor, sub-contractors and consultants have been inside a room – a very big room – on the edge of the site creating a full digital pre-build of the hospital. The room’s title reveals its ambition -

This project came onto our radar during the Integrated Project Delivery (IPD) research we did with the University of Melbourne. I took Digital Innovation on tour to three of our American offices in June and during my stay in San Francisco my itinerary included a day at Stanford University’s Center for Integrated Facility Engineering (CIFE) Summer Program and a site visit to UCSF Mission Bay.

The two link nicely as much of the thinking about how IPD fits into the construction sector in California has been developed at CIFE with Martin Fischer and John Kunz. This year’s CIFE Summer Program was focussed on IPD in practice and Atul Khanzode and Dean Reed from DPR presented. DPR is the contractor for UCSF Mission Bay. Arup is the MEP services consultant on the project.

Its not a full IPD project, as it is not operating under a multi-party agreement. Rather, it is a full integrated design financed by the client in order to achieve some of the rewards on offer through shifting the design effort earlier in the project. There are similarities in operation with IPD. The contractors, sub-contractors and consultants are a multi-party network responsible for determining specific project targets in alignment with the client’s project goals.

There were early stage workshops at CIFE to develop what metrics were appropriate for this project, and they are broadcast to the team from displays all around the room. At a glance anyone can see what quantities of a particular wall type are on the job or how many clashes remain to be resolved.

I visited the site with Raj Daswani and Reid Senscu from our San Francisco office. We were talking with Chris, the plumbing sub (above), when the steel sub came up to discuss plumbing bracing and coordination with steel. The level of trust and immediacy to decision makers is the key to the current success of the process. In the early days, the ‘big room’ referred to three rooms that were set aside for regular review meetings however they are not used much now. People know each other and negotiate with other disciplines one on one.

Throughout our visit we were told there was scepticism when this process started, but uniformly people said they didn’t want to work another way from here on.

There is full commitment to the process. The architects, including the firm’s principals, are in the big room working on the architectural model and not far away the plumbing sub-contractors are modelling details right down to bolts in their own software. One of the architects told us they had lost their seats back in their office.

We’re going to hear more about this project. Already they are estimating considerable savings from this investment in integration. What more will they reap when they start construction?

Many thanks to John Griffiths, Raj Daswani and Reid Sensecu from Arup San Francisco.

One of the key themes for this year’s Victorian State of Design (SoD) Festival is mobility and a focus of events on Tuesday 20th July. Susan de Vere, Adam Leggett, Dan Hill and I participated in the workshop on the Mobility New Thinking Demonstrator and we then attended Chris Bangle’s public talk on the Future of Personal Mobility.

SoD director Lou Weis convened the group from industry and research to consider four components of our urban journeys; initial choices, waiting, the journey experience and arrival.

Storyboards were provided for three mobility scenarios for discussion and interesting discussions were really the result of this three hour workshop. One of the most interesting discussions were from the group who adapted all three scenarios to reflect mobility difficulties confronted by someone in a wheelchair. What if we all used wheels as personal mobility devices and transport was designed for people to roll on and off?

The group Leaders were – LtoR above – Robyn Healy (RMIT),  Chris Bangle, (former BMW and now Chris Bangle and Associates), Soumitri Varadarajan (RMIT) and Michael Trudgeon (Crowd Productions). Robyn spoke about clothing for mobility, how do you make all modes accessible through clothing transformation, Chris followed with strategies to rethink journeys, Soumitri pulled the premise apart – as only Soumitri can and Michael inspired us to think about the future and where these changes can be best sited in the city.

Each table had a digital scribe – fantastic drawings that I hope we can link to sometime.

In between the workshop and Chris Bangle’s public talk we visited the Creating Liveable Cities exhibition. Greg More told us about his Flowing Data visualisation project for Melbourne Water in which the last ten years of water catchment and use data has been presented to illustrate patterns of use. Its particularly interesting as Melbourne is still under water restrictions from the longest drought in living memory and Greg had us watch one dam when seasonal rains failed to fall and the after effect of never really being able to catch up were evident in the visualisation. Fantastic link between the graphics and sound design.

Below is the Fortune 5000 installation – thousands of suspended test tubes filled with water and messages. Take one to read and reflect. Mine ended up in a bar later on. A lovely piece.

Back in November 2009 we ran the first Arup HackDay. During HackDay people from around Arup gathered to create new tools and mash data over a 24 hour period. One of the tools created at HackDay by Andrew Tsakmakis was re-purposed to create the Secret Lives of Projects.

I’ve long been interested in project-based organisations and how new knowledge can be transferred from one project to another. The Secret Lives of Projects is a visualisation of the content created during an Arup project. It is a thought piece around the question “What is the shape of a project?” and an attempt to visualise some of the patterns of content creation as we work on projects.

The original tool was developed to index data with several features for quick searches. We did some more work after HackDay and pointed it towards a project directory. We then extracted meta-data from email archives and files. People in the email archive were identified and their business units and locations matched. We then linked billing data.

In the excerpt from communication network (below) the nodes reflect a pattern of communication through the project as people email each other. Nodes with yellow or blue dots grow as they bill time and so a picture emerges of who is speaking with whom and who are the key players working on the project. If this tool ran in real-time on your desktop could you tell if people were in the loop or not?

We worked with Greg More from OOM Creative to build an application using Adobe AIR and Flex. The video shows some of the visualisations from the AIR application.

As promised in the Visual Reports post, here is the full towards zero carbon development film.

I explained in the earlier post the project started with the question of better presenting sankey diagrams. The full film is about explaining what the implications for the built environment are as we progress towards lower carbon targets and how we can progress towards achieving them.

This film was made to show Arup are not only working towards making zero carbon a realistic option we are also making it easier to understand.

All the content in the film is derived from our project work – several projects in fact – tied together to tell the story, and the narrative was developed by people who worked on the projects.

The energy chart offered the breakthrough for the narrative. Enjoy.