Interviews

Autodesk Integrates Sustainable Design

Autodesk has embraced the concept of sustainable design and is working to integrate these principals into tools to facilitate wider application. V1 Magazine editor Matt Ball spoke with Dawn Danby, sustainable design program manager at Autodesk about how these concepts are being applied, and the future promise of this approach that considers the environment and the community as guiding design criteria.

V1: I’m really interested in your background as a designer and your practical experience with sustainable design. Can you outline the Green Corridor project that you did in the city of Windsor, Ontario?

Danby: The Green Corridor was a project that I worked on that was kicked off by Noel Harding, a Toronto artist who does really large-scale environmental artwork. He creates works that incorporate intelligence around landscape architecture, architectural and structural design, and living systems to be able to pull them off.

For context, we were teaching a class at the University of Windsor. We created a very rudimentary physical model of this area leading up to the Detroit/Windsor border crossing, one of the biggest international borders in North America.

We got a GIS file, printed it out and covered two tables with it, and then built a physical model on top of it to show what could be done in this region. We invited politicians and community folks to look at it and they got really excited and put us on the design team for designing a pedestrian bridge that was going over the wall of trucks that goes over a bridge. All of the large semi trailer trucks are almost a permanent piece of infrastructure there because they’re always stacked up hauling goods back and forth across the border.

I ended up on this design team that was primarily structural and civil engineers with two artists—Green Corridor founders Noel Harding and Rod Strickland. I was the only self-described “designer” on that team. It was a really good lesson in understanding how much of the infrastructure of the world gets built.

If you’re trained as a designer you think in terms of drawings, how people move through space, and experience, and images. And the engineers that we were working with had a very different way of going about things. We started coming in initially with drawings and then building 3D models and bringing in animation as we went along. I was basically a coordinator between conceptual artists and the structural and civil engineers.

It connects to what I’m doing now in a lot of ways. The realization that so many of the decisions that are being made in the world in terms of resource use, infrastructure and building (things that we would consider in the design realm) are being done by folks that wouldn’t describe themselves as designers. They don’t think in terms of sustainability in their work, and they’re not as concerned about aesthetics the way that a designer might be. There’s a huge opportunity in getting tools to civil and structural designers, and people doing city planning, or those that come from primarily an engineering background so that they can start thinking about sustainability. Building in more analysis and data will help them see the benefits of making one decision over another.

V1: Do you have a set definition about what sustainable design is?

Danby: I think it really depends on whom I’m talking to. We broadly say that sustainable design is the intersection of design, sustainability and innovation. A lot of the time what we’re really talking about is making stuff that doesn’t hurt us or the living things around us, either directly or indirectly.

Ecological impacts aren’t always visible, social impacts aren’t things that can be easily quantified, and we have a responsibility to both. When I talk to people that aren’t familiar with the term sustainability or just don’t like it for whatever reason, I just talk about using far fewer resources, whether it’s energy, water or materials, and eliminating the use of waste sinks. In a literal sense, we talk about waste, landfill and pollution. We also think about what we’re doing to the climate, almost like an atmospheric landfill. Decreasing resource use and eliminating waste are really basic things that a lot of folks resonate with.

V1: One thing that we talk about in terms of our mission is a holistic approach. And I think that came through in the multidisciplinary approach of the projects that you’ve done. Are you focused on getting larger teams and perspectives together on projects?

Danby: It’s essential. More and more design is really complex. Systems are complex. You don’t need a multidisciplinary team if you’re designing a coffee table and building it in your garage. But as soon as you decide that you want to manufacture that overseas, then all of a sudden you’re dealing with a whole different complexity, new information and more people. When you scale up and start dealing with buildings and infrastructure, then you absolutely need multidisciplinary teams to make a good design; something that works, is beautiful, and sits lightly on the earth.

When we were designing the bridge we obviously needed civil and structural engineers to make sure that the bridge worked, but we started to expand the criteria beyond that to consider how it looked, felt, how you experience it, and what its impact was on the landscape. Having all those people around the table is really helpful.

When you’re dealing with large projects, you’re always going to have multidisciplinary teams of some sort. One of the things that’s a necessity when dealing with digital tools and large digital files is getting our applications to play well with each other. The more we can get our applications and files to share with one another, the better off we are.

V1: With your role in terms of managing software for spatial design, how can software spur that movement?

Danby: It certainly can help, and I think it can do that in a really interesting way by getting tools, analysis and data into the hands of key decision makers.

I think we can start seeing sustainable design as not just a conceptual niche trend, but as a highly practical and necessary way to work. When it becomes the natural way of doing work, we will have really moved the needle.  To do that, we need to get the right tools to the folks responsible for making things in the world.

Any time you see a project succeed in having a lower impact on the environment, it’s always going to be a combination of the tools, the information, as well as the intelligence of the team. The tool itself will never ever do the whole project for you. It’s simply an extension of your team’s intelligence and their design criteria.

In terms of spurring a movement, if there’s a way of getting tools into people’s hands and making it really simple and acceptable, then it’s no longer a big theoretical question. We’re not talking about the theory of sustainability, it’s about doing work intelligently.

V1: One tool that I’m really fascinated with is Green Building Studio, and I think that builds off other Autodesk concepts such as the BIM dashboard, the idea that you could see the building’s future energy use as you design, to get direct feedback as you design. Is that a tool that you’re working with?

Danby: I have a lot of admiration for Green Building Studio and Ecotect. They’re different in terms of the kind of feedback that you get, and how they provide information back to you. Ecotect is very visual and Green Building Studio provides reports that are more in the form of straight numbers. In both cases, the tools give you really good feedback throughout the design process.

These are tools that can also give you really important feedback early in the design process. At the stage when you just have the rough building shape, you can get feedback on the rough energy use, airflow, natural daylighting and other things before building out a really detailed BIM model.

It’s tough to apply sustainable design after you’ve invested a large amount of time and emotional effort. These are really interesting tools throughout the design process, because they allow you to run analysis and to make good decisions at all stages of design development. But they’re remarkably helpful at the stage when you’re still thinking about all the possible options. You’re in need of some guidance about the environmental impacts of what your decisions might be. Once you’ve invested in a project emotionally and start building a team and building a model in deeper and deeper detail, or when a client has gotten attached to something, it becomes very expensive to go back and make major changes.

Green Building Studio and Ecotect are very helpful tools from that perspective, as well as being able to run the sophisticated in-depth analysis later on when the model is close to finished.

V1: In the current economic climate, it seems that the ability to demonstrate cost savings and energy savings are becoming more important. What is your feeling on the current business drivers for sustainable design?

Danby: It’s mixed. I think we’re still seeing that play out, and I don’t want to suggest that I know where things are going. We’re certainly seeing a slowdown in the creation of new buildings, and rapid recognition of the impact that we’re having on the planet. We realize that we need to make changes in how we make or build anything.

Building cheaply ends up being very expensive, on several levels.  I’m hoping that when people see the need for cost savings that they’re thinking in terms of operational cost over time. Thinking in terms of what the building will cost with regard to energy prices, climate and other things over time, rather than saying that we’re in an economically constrained world and we need to build cheap.

There’s so much more interest, and so much further to go: We’re seeing both of those things at the same time. I’m enormously hopeful in the sense that there has been a really rapid, dramatic shift in the dialogue around sustainable design, particularly in the green building space since I started out.

I worked for green builders and landscape planners ten years ago, and it was a very tiny space. The notion that we’re at the point that we are right now in North America is really mind blowing.

V1: One thing that I report on, and that I hold hope for, is government mandates. It’s a touchy subject, but there seems to be a growing interest in pushing how design is executed. With the amount of infrastructure spending that is being talked about, there’s some talk that there might be a lot of oversight that would provide opportunity for more robust tools and processes. Do you see any hope in mandates?

Danby: I feel like I’m waiting to see what it all means, particularly with any new spending in the United States, to see where all of that goes. I’m very hopeful that it will mean that we’re investing in resilience of infrastructure. I’m excited by things like SmartGrids, which is something that we’re very interested in here at Autodesk for helping utilities to be much more efficient.

It’s hard to see where this is all heading right now. Autodesk has been focused on providing tools broadly across all our industries. I’m hoping that our work supports the infrastructure investment effort. I don’t think it means that we’ll be inventing some brand new thing in response to the mandate.

V1: You’re integrating the ideas of sustainable design so that your users can respond to any new opportunities?

Danby: These are things that we’ve been talking about regardless of political and economic shifts. We’ve been talking about the sustainability of infrastructure, cities and buildings and manufacturing for much longer than the more recent economic events.

V1: I look at digital cities and look at it as a means of bringing sustainable design into broader geographies. And more specifically, we’ve been following the development of LEED for neighborhood development as a means to establish the concept of larger sustainable communities.

Danby: I think this is a really important question, making sustainable design relevant to broader geographies. In one sense, designing something in regard to environmental impacts is to design for context. You need contextual information to make decisions, and that means, for example, having specific information about your site and about what the energy mix might be in that location. And that’s even true in manufacturing where you need to understand your supply chain to understand if you’re designing green products or not.

Part of what we’re looking at is data that can be applied globally, so that our tools that do sustainable design analysis can perform that regardless of where you are in the world. Our customers, even if they design within the United States, may not be designing for the United States.

I think part of the challenge is getting data that is globally relevant. And also looking at how we can train and help our customers use tools they may not be used to using. Whether that means a shift in the kinds of applications that they use or introducing applications into new geographies. Autodesk is a global company and we’re laser focused on having our tools be relevant globally.

V1: Do you have a vision of the future in terms of what you’d like to accomplish through Autodesk’s toolsets to further sustainable design?

Danby: I want to make sustainable design really simple and to enable all of our customers to make better decisions. My vision is for sustainable design not to be a separate conversation. I want to get to the point where addressing environmental impact becomes standard criteria for all designers all the time, including engineers, city planners, manufacturers, utility designers.

To the extent that Autodesk can provide information and guidance that’s seamless, that would be one measure of success. The real measure of success is seeing our customers increasingly make better, less impactful decisions. My hope is that, in combination with having really good tools, designers will have increasing access to information as well as be informed about the broader context.

We’re talking about changing the way that things are done, which means changing culture in a lot of ways. For designers to think in completely different ways about what they make and to have that just be normal, would be fantastic.

It really is not helpful for sustainable design to be special. It’s almost as if we need to dispense of all of our specialness. To a certain extent, that means seeing value in things that aren’t immediately in your line of sight. Climate change, for instance, is something that’s still an abstraction for a lot of people and needs to be a major part of our criteria. We need to be thinking about climate as a cost of entry.

Despite all the growth that we’re seeing, we still have a long way to go.