by Michael Tardif, Assoc. AIA
Contributing Editor

Summary: On January 31, 133 design professionals from 11 countries participated in BIMStorm LAX, a 24-hour, online design charrette in which another 700 people participated as observers. Loosely organized into 25 teams, participants developed plans for large sections of the city, creating massing models and schematic designs for 420 buildings totaling over 55 million square feet. Buildings ranged in size from a 600-square-foot house to a proposed 2 million-square-foot bank tower.

The grassroots exercise was organized by Kimon Onuma, FAIA, founder and president of Onuma, Inc., in Pasadena, Calif., as a proof-of-concept demonstration of the Onuma Planning System (OPS), an online collaboration tool created by Onuma and first described in this column in August 2007.

Organizing platform
Onuma created OPS as an online platform to organize any available information created in the planning, programming, or building design process and leverage that information for rapid prototyping and decision making. A BIMStorm allows any and all stakeholders and participants involved in creating the built environment—owners, design professionals, constructors, facility managers, end users, and the public—to collaborate in the early decision-making process. It allows participants to interact with the information in the way that is most familiar to them, whether the preferred interface is a spreadsheet of spatial requirements, adjacency diagrams, scaled floor plans, three-dimensional massing or building models, or even hand sketches.

BIMStorm LAX was an exercise to push the OPS technology to its limits. While an urban design charrette typically would be organized in response to the urban development requirements of an urban planning agency, anyone and everyone who wished to participate in the BIMStorm was welcome to do so, each bringing his or her own planning and design objectives to the process. Remarkably, even without the constraints of defined objectives, the BIMStorm participants were able to collaborate and cooperate in a way that yielded meaningful results. In response to an e-mail inquiry from Mario Guttman, AIA, of HOK, one of seven reviewers who will be evaluating the results of BIMStorm LAX over the next month, Kimon Onuma replied: “For all of the participants (including the Onuma team) much of this was a first time experience. Some had never used the [OPS] tools until a few hours before starting, others [had been] practicing for awhile. There was some confusion and chaos, but it was an organized chaos since we used open, interoperable standards.”

“Lessons learned from communication were very interesting and what we expected,” Onuma added. “We tried to minimize or eliminate completely the need to communicate by traditional methods—e-mail, voice, or documents—and focused on communicating with data. For example, a team in California submits a building into OPS, it gets downloaded [in IFC format] in Honolulu, where they design the structural system and submit it back. A team in Manila continues with the structural design, a team in the Netherlands picks up the building and designs the mechanical system, a team in the U.K. runs the same building through Ecotect for energy analysis. Most of these teams did not communicate at all other than through the IFC model, or did not even know the other team existed. They just had to log on and view the reality of what was being developed and run with it.”

Imagine what would be possible
“Imagine what would we possible,” Onuma continued, “if this was all planned out and the teams actually did a bit of [advance] coordination and [the exercise took place over the course of] a week instead of only 24 hours. The baseline is that they are all talking the same language and the reality of the project is data [sharing and exchange] that is real-time, live, and accessible [to all project participants] no matter which tool they use or their level of expertise.”

OPS—built on open standards—allows participants in a planning and design process to use whatever tool they choose to complete a particular task. Participants might not even know which tools other participants are using. The tools used for BIMStorm LAX included paper-and-pencil overlays for early concept planning and design; ArchiCAD by Graphisoft, Revit Architecture by Autodesk, and VectorWorks by Nemetschek North America for building design; Ecotect by Square One Research for energy analysis; Elite CAD by Elite Software for HVAC systems design; MARS Facility Cost Forecast System by Whitestone Research for operations and maintenance cost forecasting; Google Earth for “landing” buildings on a virtual representation of LA; and, of course, OPS for generating a variety of data and graphical reports, including spatial data summaries and construction cost estimates.

Taking planning to the next level
Mary Dolan, master planner and supervisor for environmental planning in the Montgomery County, Md., planning department, immediately recognized the potential of an online collaboration tool such as OPS for community planning. She observed that BIMStorm LAX focused more heavily on building design than master planning, but realized that was a reflection of the professional orientation of the self-selected participants and the information they brought to the exercise, not a limitation of the technology. “[Participants] weren’t able to take advantage of [information] resources that the city has at the master-planning level,” said Dolan. “They eventually did get a property file that had some land-use coding information, but weren’t able to make full use of it because they didn’t get it early in the process. But once they did, you could see the versatility [of the tool] for master planning. It was clear that GIS information easily could be incorporated. For a planning agency, the potential advantages were evident.”

“We use GIS and spreadsheets to analyze alternatives all the time,” Dolan continued. “Since the tool can accommodate all those inputs, it’s a framework to hang it on. You could even look at fiscal impacts [during the charrette process]—future tax revenue generated, potential development impact fees, cost of related necessary capital improvements. We do this now, but in much more incremental way. We could build these things into the charrette process as rules, and have these impacts noted somewhere. Flags could pop up, [warning] you that you’ve expanded [the design scheme] to a level where some other need [must now be met].

“We need to take our planning to the next level, have it more accessible, dynamic, exciting, at more convenient times [for public participation]. It’s hard getting people to attend meetings regularly. If we had a tool where they could interact dynamically, then they could comment more conveniently—from home, from a community center, or from a church—in a way that would give them their own process. They could participate in testing ‘what if’ scenarios.

“So much time is spent in the master planning process visually depicting information we have for all stakeholders. Because of the graphic nature of it, you can only do certain things on certain maps: you have a transportation map, a circulation map, a stream map, an impervious surface map; but you can’t display them in any interactive way. The potential of [an interactive online tool such as OPS] is that you could do that. [Watching the BIMStorm], you could sense its potential as a dynamic planning application.”