by Michael Tardif, Assoc. AIA
Contributing Editor

Summary: Following a lecture to students in Boston in the early 1980s, AIA Gold Medalist Michael Graves, FAIA, was asked to name the single most important attribute of a successful architect. Without a moment’s hesitation, he answered, “A high tolerance for ambiguity.”

This insight sums up nicely why the design process is so hard to describe in words. At the start of every design project, a large number of factors—many conflicting, some unknown—must be considered and synthesized. And throughout the design process, new information must be integrated as efficiently as possible. Design synthesis—the ability to orchestrate the development of a coherent building design out of a morass of regulatory, programmatic, financial, aesthetic, environmental, social, and technical requirements—ranks high among the specialized, value-added skills that architects bring to the building and design construction process.

Design synthesis is the unique domain of architects—no other member of the design and construction team brings it to the table—and its value increases exponentially with the complexity of the project. And yet, it is a skill for which architects are insufficiently recognized or compensated, in part because it is an implicit skill that architects apply routinely throughout the design process.

Enter the OPS
These are issues that Kimon Onuma, AIA, has pondered for years and to which he has devoted the last 12 years of his career. He set out to develop a way to leverage architects’ design synthesis skill for maximum benefit and make its value apparent to clients. Onuma realized that ambiguity is greatest early in the design process, before design begins. Decisions are often made in the programming phase of a project that have enormous downstream implications—for aesthetics, cost, energy consumption, and the ultimate suitability of a building for its intended purpose—on the basis of inaccurate, incomplete, or unreliable information. Even the most sophisticated and experienced clients, for example, can have difficulty codifying their programmatic requirements at the very beginning of a project. In the absence of reliable information, design iteration often takes the place of strategic planning and programming. Many clients and architects have come to rely on multiple design iterations—an expensive, inefficient, and time-consuming process—to advance their mutual understanding.

Onuma’s solution is a software tool—the Onuma Planning System™ (OPS)—that enables project teams to amass and synthesize programmatic information far more quickly than is possible with any current method. Asked to sum up OPS in a single sentence, Onuma says, “It allows you to test a lot of decisions early on and bump into problems early so that you can go in another direction.” His commitment to build OPS on open standards such as the IAI’s Industry Foundation Classes (IFCs), extensible markup language (XML), and other Internet and e-commerce standards means that the information generated in the planning process using OPS can be exchanged easily yet securely with all parties involved in a project and can be integrated easily into the design process by exporting in IFC format to building design applications such as ArchiCAD, Bentley Architecture, or Revit Architecture. Relying on open-source software solutions such as mySQL Enterprise Server, PHP Hypertext Preprocessor, and Apache HTTP Server means that data entered into OPS will never get locked up in a proprietary data format.

You see what you can use
Regardless of the size and complexity of any project data set, OPS allows information to be displayed graphically in multiple ways, allowing architects to communicate visually by giving “early physical expression to complex requirements.” OPS project information can be displayed as a table in Microsoft Excel, as a bubble diagram or scaled adjacency diagram on a floor or site plan in OPS, or as three dimensional volumes on an actual site in Google Earth.

The user-friendly, Web-based graphical interfaces of OPS enable any team member—owner, architect, engineer, contractor, facility manager—to interact with project data in the way that is most familiar to each. “We can isolate parts of the system to users’ needs and perspectives,” says Onuma, “providing different entry points to the data for different users.”

The Onuma Planning System is a building information modeling (BIM) tool that allows design teams to begin creating a building informational model using data in whatever format is most readily available or convenient: as structured data, such as an Excel spreadsheet; as simple, scaled, geometry; or both. Data exported from OPS is then available as an advanced starting point for the more complex building geometry of a building information model, which would otherwise have to be started from scratch. As the design develops, the more highly detailed BIM can later be brought back into OPS to test the design against the original program requirements.

It’s not the design
Because OPS is able to express complex programmatic requirements so well graphically and spatially, many architects initially are taken aback by what they erroneously perceive to be a reductivist, requirements-driven approach to design. But as Onuma is the first to point out, the product of OPS is not building design at all. It is merely a tangible, graphical expression of a client’s complex programmatic requirements and a project’s many design constraints—the very things that an architect will have to address at some point in the design process. By giving early physical expression to complex project requirements—space requirements, adjacencies, height limitations, setback requirements, security requirements, net-to-gross area ratios, maximum floor/area ratios, site factors, and many others—architects are able to address these requirements in the way that is most natural for them: graphically and spatially rather than prescriptively. “We try to create a place to land any type of data,” says Onuma, “even if it is not typically shown in a BIM.”

OPS enables architects to perform rapid prototyping of multiple scenarios and early testing of conflicting requirements to determine whether they can be resolved, and if so, how. It allows many parties with a high degree of professional knowledge—architects, owners, engineers, security analysts, contractors, and others—to interact in real time and incorporate their specialized knowledge into the project data. It allows project teams to visualize all types of data, document the decisions they make, and continually eliminate ambiguities as decisions are made. Viewing the data, however, requires little or no professional knowledge or computer skill. An architect with only cursory knowledge of building security and bomb blast effects, for example, can open a data set and immediately see which spaces need attention through a graphical, color-coded interface. “The goal of the entire system,” says Onuma, “is to allow users having little knowledge and only minimal technical skill to get to the knowledge.”