1. Message from the Directors

The first winter rains have come to the Stanford campus, remnants of an unusually strong typhoon off the Pacific. The continuing students have returned, enthusiastic and hopeful as always, joined by new undergraduates, Master’s and doctoral students who mix anxiety with their enthusiasm and hope.

In the past few months:

• Calvin Kam joined the CIFE staff to take a leadership role in industry outreach. As a doctoral student, he worked several years at the US GSA where he had major responsibility for initiating the GSA BIM guides, which now specify the requirements for using the building information modeling component of VDC in all GSA projects. After a full-time appointment at the GSA he led the implementation of VDC for CIFE member company Optima. We expect that he will contribute significantly to our ability to support member opportunities.
• CIFE held Summer Program sessions in Washington, DC, co-hosted with the US General Services Administration, and later in the summer at Stanford.  The DC session discussed the owner perspective on VDC, while the Stanford session discussed the emerging methods of CIFE researchers and some early adopting practitioners in support of more sustainable building and infrastructure projects.
• The CIFE Industry Advisory Board (IAB) held its annual meeting in September. The Advisory board meets to review CIFE activities, give its guidance about the most important issues for CIFE attention, and discuss broad issues of AEC industry status. The IAB confirmed last year’s recommendation that CIFE focus its efforts on how VDC can help improve the lifecycle performance of the built environment and how VDC can help CIFE members add more value throughout the built environment lifecycle. This expanded scope of VDC matches the main departmental and university initiatives in the areas of engineering for sustainability and energy and environment very well.
• The first group of eighteen graduated from the CIFE/SPS VDC Certificate Program and we held our held our fifth Introductory session in September. The new graduates were proud and we are proud of their progress and accomplishments in using VDC. We have now had 112 participants in the program.
• Member organization Optima recently won threee AIA awards and current and former CIFE students won awards and recognition.
• CIFE students led a detailed investigation of the performance of the new Energy and Environment building at Stanford, which led to some startling results about the difficulty of achieving high energy performance in buildings today.
• Stanford students demonstrated how it is now possible to use online sampling methods to assess the nature and extent of support for various potentially controversial design alternatives within a large stakeholder community. They conducted a study of engineering options and a financial analysis, finding surprising community support for the high speed rail and significant associated development.

2. CIFE Summer Program

The annual CIFE Summer Program again met two times this year: in Washington, D.C. in June and at Stanford in September. The US GSA co-hosted the Washington meeting, which focused on owner needs for rapid and sustainable development and designers' and builders' capability to deliver quickly, well and sustainably.

The Washington program was designed to address owners’ perceptions of the challenges they face to make their building inventories dramatically more energy efficient and simultaneously supportive of vastly more complex program needs. The owner challenge includes both new developments and retrofit of existing portfolios.

The Stanford program focused more on emerging methods that will enable AEC organizations to respond to the needs of owners.

3. Industry Advisory Board (IAB)

Meeting participants from many of the CIFE member-level organizations discussed their internal status, which is challenging for all, but gratefully there was strong and often very wide and deep commitment to VDC within those organizations. We discussed our CIFE cultural values, which are to be open and transparent to members, colleagues, students; directed toward big ideas; evidence-based; committed to integrated theory and observation of practice; systematic and focused to serve our members, students, and university; and help the industry as we can. The Introductory Course to the Certificate Program has now had 112 participants, and 18 have successfully completed the six-month program. There were many outreach activities with interns and two summer programs, and VDC now forms a core element of the Stanford CEE curriculum. Recent survey results document the breadth and depth of VDC use within CIFE member organizations, all of whom plan more VDC use in the coming year.

We also reviewed the 2015 breakthrough objectives for CIFE member organizations. Recent federal and California law both now require dramatic improvement in building energy use. In addition, the adjacent graph [Source: Sustainable Energy — without the hot air: MacKay, 2008, based on Baer and Mastrandrea (2006)] shows the (equivalent) global per capital tons of CO2 production per year, which has risen from 5 to 6 tCO2/y per person in the past decade. If the global per capita emissions drop to 1 tCO2/y per person by 2050, there is only a 9-26% chance of global warming of 2oC, which is enough to change almost every aspect of human activity. Our conclusion within CIFE is that statute, public demand that all buildings in the world use dramatically less energy for construction and operation (be built with low CO2 use and operate as Zero Energy Buildings, which of course will dramatically change every aspect of ownership, design, construction and operation of facilities. Our conclusion is that the CIFE 2015 objective of improving sustainability by 25% has become exceedingly important, and future objectives will be must more stringent. Please see “2009-10 Seed Projects” on the CIFE Research page.

In addition to looking at energy use in detail, current CIFE research includes several projects to develop improved methods of performance-based design, increased prefabrication following attention to the supply chain, social network for sustainable building practices, improved construction materials and methods to facilitate Integrated Project Delivery (IPD).

Members discussed a number of topics for CIFE attention. The most highly rated topics are listed below, each with its relative priority:

10  Publish information on ongoing CIFE and member company projects more frequently and in a more accessible way
  7 Develop curriculum to scale VDC education and training
  7 Software evaluations, in particular BIM and related analysis programs, feedback to vendors (CIFE approved software)
  6 Develop the total process collaboration model
  5 Develop a strategic roadmap for improving energy performance of buildings
  5 Develop metrics to describe building value
  5 Develop a method for unbelievably fast construction

4. VDC Certificate Program

The certificate Program has now completed five introductory sessions, attended by 112 professionals. Following the one week introductory class, participants have a six-month field segment of the program and bring VDC methods to their own projects and report monthly to us and the group on the models they build, the model-based analyses they make, the performance metrics they measure and the impact of these methods and metrics on project performance. The initial cohort has implemented a number of iRooms with universal positive reports from their stakeholder communities; started to use 3D architectural, steel, sprinkler, HVAC and MEP models; initiated collaborative architectural reviews; and enhanced constructability through the use of 3D and 4D models. Groups measure performance of different process metrics including pre-construction and field RFIs, latency, interferences, cost and schedule conformance and stakeholder participation.

The Certificate Program directly addresses one of the measurable 2010 goals is that member organizations "Staff each project with four VDC trained engineers." We find the enthusiasm of participants gratifying and are hopeful of the continued popularity of the program. Please see the separate description of the Certificate Program.

We were proud to graduate the first eighteen professionals from the CIFE/SPS Virtual Design and Construction Certificate Program. They completed a five-day Introductory course at Stanford, a six-plus month VDC implementation effort, and a two-day Integration Experience. To our knowledge, this group is the first in the world to receive formal VDC education, and it is a remarkable personal and corporate commitment to education in this tough economic climate. The graduates span the range of positions and companies in the construction industry including company presidents, regional managers, project managers, division leaders, and project engineers. They are from owner, design, program management, construction, and subcontractor companies. Participants came from the US and one is from the Netherlands. Please see program details and the recent article in ENR.

The next class runs December 14-18, 2009, so please sign up because space is limited to twenty.

5. Awards to CIFE Member & CIFE Alumnus & Student

 Congratulations to CIFE member Optima for receiving two top Arizona AIA Design Awards in 2009 and a Chicago AIA Award 2009. David Hovey & Associates designed the first project, which Optima built and now is selling. This 2M GSF 700-unit mixed-use condominium has eleven terraced, bridge-linked buildings that create a pedestrian friendly shaded environment of interconnected landscaped courtyards. The community integrates local contemporary architectural features, elements, materials and vernacular with the demands of high density twenty-first century residential design. Twenty three acres of garden terraces were created on the 13 acre site through the extensive use of green roof technology and by locating all parking below grade.

Also with Optima, David Hovey, Jr., designed the Relic Rock project as a prototype for a sustainable, modular, prefabricated architectural building system designed to be adaptable to a range of different climates. The program uses synergy of architecture, technology and construction methodology and respects the regional desert environment of the site. The building shows the potential of using highly efficient prefabrication methods to achieve both great architectural beauty and dramatically reducedconstruction duration and dramatically increased dimensional and schedule reliability.

CIFE alumnus Chuck Han won Grand Prize at the recent Siggraph 2009 meeting for his development of NaviCAD, which allows users to view and navigate 3D models on a iPhone.

CIFE student Victor Gane received a very complimentary notice for his role in the award-winning design for the Infinity Tower in Dubai.

6. Investigation of Building Energy Use

John Kunz led the Stanford CEE243 graduate class in the Spring of 2009 that analyzed (some of) the measured building energy system data, made predictions using energy analysis tools, compared measured, predicted and expected data value, attempted to interpret measured values as conforming or not to design intent, and made some recommendations to the owner.  The Technical Report has many more details.

Findings of a class study included that students with no prior background could successfully access and interpret measured energy performance data from the data acquisition computer; overall building energy use met code objectives but dramatically exceeded initial design objectives, and some HVAC components and systems worked well and others did not work as planned. Perhaps most importantly, a gifted set of eleven students together worked about 1,100 hours to interpret only about ten percent of the available data, and discover 38 of 52 known performance problems, which strongly indicates that the current process to access and interpret data is not sufficiently routine and automated to allow effective continuous energy system commissioning on a significant commercial scale. CIFE student Tobias Maile has developed a method to compare actual and predicted performance data. The method enabled him to detect 52 performance problems in 450 hours.

The Stanford University Jerry Yang and Akiko Yamazaki Environment and Energy Building (Y2E2) completed its first full year of operation in 2008. The 166K square foot building now holds a multidisciplinary set of researchers and students from several schools departments and “inspire faculty, staff, students and visitors to take the next steps toward a sustainable future.” Following analysis of energy simulation predictions based on a building information model (BIM), building designers added energy saving features including natural ventilation, heat recovery, central atria for light and circulation, and “night flushing” or opening rooftop windows in the atria to allow hot building air to escape to the outside on cool evenings to be replaced with outside air. In addition, the building was built with 2,500 HVAC system measurement points which are sampled by a computer-based data collection system each minute or 1,440 times per day, which represents about 3.5M samples/day for the building. 

7. Survey of High Speed Rail Support

An encouraging implication for CIFE members is that it is quick and relatively easy to use online sampling methods to assess the nature and extent of support for various design alternatives within a large stakeholder community.

Voters recently passed a $10B bond issue to do initial design for a California high speed rail project, tentatively to go through Palo Alto. The students found in a survey of over two hundred respondents that a large plurality (74%) favored tunneled high speed train with a stop in Palo Alto, surrounded by high-density development in the downtown area near the station, followed by about 22% who favored a high speed train on an elevated track with a stop in Palo Alto, accompanied by minimal development near the station, and only a small fraction (<5%) favored high speed train on an elevated track with no stop in Palo Alto and no new development in the downtown area. There is considerable surprise within the advisory group for the finding of broad support for tunneling and associated high-density development to generate adequate “air rights” to pay for the tunneling.  The implication is that there is the potential to direct early effort more toward engineering and financial analysis and rather less toward consensus building.

The students implemented their survey based on the MACDADI method of considering multiple design criteria and considering their relative weights, which Prof. John Haymaker developed with extensive support of CIFE member companies and CIFE research funding support.

8. New CIFE Publications

TR184: "A Mediated Interaction Approach to Study the Role of Media Use in Team Interaction"
Kathleen Liston
(September 2009; 283 pages; download size: 24,002 KB) Download

Do differences in how teams use media relate to differences in how teams interact? Does media use play a role in meeting synergy or breakdowns? This dissertation explores these questions in the context of Architecture, Engineering, and Construction (AEC) project meetings, using an approach that I developed, called Mediated Interaction Approach (MIA). My observations of over 100 project meetings showed that ìgoodî and ìbadî patterns of mediated interaction recur in meeting practice. The observations also showed that each meeting is unique, but made up of hundreds of interactions and patterns of interaction that repeat themselves in a meeting and from meeting to meeting. However, practitioners, media designers, and researchers lack methods and metrics to discern, describe, assess, and compare different patterns of mediated interaction. Consequently, practitioners and media designers rely on intuition or anecdotal evidence to make changes to meeting practice

or meeting media. Developing such methods requires analyzing the relationship between media use and team interaction at a micro-level to identify and abstract patterns of mediated interaction that practitioners and media designers can use as a resource to improve meeting practice and meeting media.

Prior approaches examining aspects of the relationship between team interaction and media use miss key aspects of this dynamic, fall short of operationalizing team interaction or media use concepts, or are ill-suited for the meeting context. Existing models of team interaction conceptualize interaction as multipurpose and analyzable with respect to three key processesócommunication, reaction, and actionóand these processes make contributions to project goals, to the meeting process (and its goals), and to interpersonal interactions. Existing studies operationalize at most two aspects of team interaction, e.g., communication and action, and address typically just one level of analysis, i.e., in relation to project goals, the meeting process, or interpersonal interactions. Thus, existing models and constructs are idealistic and unidimensional and do not capture the multi-purpose and multi-level nature of meeting interaction. Additionally, prior approaches operationalize team interaction and media use constructs that are task-, study-, or media- specific and are ill-suited for ad-hoc meetings that typically involve multiple tasks and multiple media. These studies limit their examination to feature-specific aspects of media use as opposed to general aspects of use, such as frequency and accessibility, level of interactivity, and instrumental purpose of media. This makes it difficult to compare patterns of media use involving multiple media. Finally, existing approaches miss the temporal aspect of meeting interaction and often rely on post-process data rather than observations. This makes it difficult to identify different patterns of mediated interaction that emerge and recur in meetings.

I developed MIA to address these shortcomings by observing over 100 AEC project meetings over a ten-year period and by analyzing 5,000 meeting interactions. MIA makes two key assumptions. First, the meeting process is analyzable as a set of discrete meeting interactions, each of which is analyzable from two distinct vantage points: how teams interact and how teams use media. Second, each meeting interaction v is analyzable relative to a standard of performance, regardless of task(s), that accounts for the multipurpose and multi-level nature of teams. MIA comprises the following four contributions:

(a) A model of the meeting interaction process, the Mediated Interaction Model (MIM), that integrates and builds on prior models of interaction and media use, applies to multi-task and multiple media contexts, and conceptualizes the meeting interaction as four interdependent processes: communication, reaction, action, and media use that make contributions to the project, meeting process, and interpersonal interactions.

(b) A Mediated Interaction Analytic (MIA) scheme to operationalize the MIM concepts by interpreting and coding video-recorded meeting interactions.

(c) An Interaction Spectra Method to operationalize and visualize the multi-categorical, temporal concepts of team interaction and media use as a spectrum: a) the Richness of Interaction spectrum, representing the range of interaction from breakdown to status quo to synergy and the extent to which teams achieve synergy and b) the Richness of Media Use spectrum (RMU), representing the range of media use from no use to rich use and the extent to which teams interact and engage with media use in the meeting interaction.

(d) The MIA Relational Spectra Method to describe patterns of mediated interaction and the process of how teams use media in relation to the process of how teams interact.

Findings from MIA show that it is not the task or media that matter, but the interaction and media use. Teams achieved synergy performing a range of tasks using a range of media. Teams that make media part of the team interaction, i.e., involve media in key aspects of team interaction, experience more synergy. Teams that enact a less rich role for media, i.e., infrequent use of media and minimal physical interaction with media, are more likely to maintain status quo and experience intermittent breakdowns. The findings suggest a mutually dependent symbiotic relationship between media use and team interaction in AEC meetings. MIA describes but does not yet explain the differences in meeting interaction and is a step towards developing normative models of media use and team interaction in natural contexts.

TR183: "Summary of the Energy Analysis of the First Year of the Stanford Jerry Yang & Akiko Yamazaki Environment & Energy (Y2E2) Building"
John Kunz, Tobias Maile, Vlado Bazjanac
(August 2009; 14 pages; download size: 4,334 KB) Download

The Stanford University Jerry Yang and Akiko Yamazaki Environment and Energy Building (Y2E2) completed its first full year of operation in 2008. The 166K square foot building was designed to accommodate a multidisciplinary set of researchers and students from several schools departments and “inspire faculty, staff, students and visitors to take the next steps toward a sustainable future.” Following analysis of energy simulation predictions based on a building information model (BIM), building designers added energy saving features including natural ventilation, heat recovery, central atria for light and circulation, and “night flushing” or opening rooftop windows in the atria to allow hot building air to escape to the outside on cool evenings to be replaced with outside air. In addition, the building was built with 2,370 HVAC system measurement points each of which is sampled by a computer-based data collection system each minute or 1,440 times per day, which represents about 3.5M samples/day for the building. We led the Stanford CEE243 graduate class in the Spring of 2009 that analyzed (some of) the measured building energy system data, made predictions using energy analysis tools, compared measured, predicted and expected data value, attempted to interpret measured values as conforming or not to design intent, and made some recommendations to the owner. Findings of the class study included that students with no prior background could successfully access and interpret measured energy performance data from the data acquisition computer; overall building energy use met code objectives but dramatically exceeded initial design objectives; some HVAC components and systems worked well and others did not work as planned, and a gifted set of eleven students together worked about a thousand hours to interpret only about ten percent of the available data, which strongly indicates that the current process to access and interpret data is not sufficiently routine and automated to allow effective continuous energy system commissioning on a significant commercial scale.

TR182: "Multi-Attribute Interaction Design: An Integrated Conceptual Design Process for Modeling Interactions and Maximizing Value"
Andrew Baratz Ehrich, John Haymaker
(July 2009; 27 pages; download size: 948 KB) Download

Integrated design synthesizes combinations of options to take advantage of interactions that maximize multidisciplinary value. As resources become further constrained, options more numerous and goals increasingly complex, it is more critical and more challenging for design teams to find these integrated solutions. Theory proposes the integration of transformation, flow, and value (TFV) views as necessary to support such integrated design. This paper develops requirements for these views that encourage creative, flexible, and yet systematic integrated conceptual design processes. It then illustrates how these requirements are only partially satisfied by current design management systems and introduces a new framework, Multi-Attribute Interaction Design (MAID) to fill this void by systematically guiding design teams to explicitly consider the potential interactions of options and the resulting value of design solutions. We demonstrate the use of MAID on two industry case studies, illustrating how the integrated TFV views can lead teams to discover and record more interactions and higher value solutions than current practice.

WP124: "Improving Design Processes through Collaborating, Sharing, and Understanding"
Reid Senescu, John Haymaker
(May 2009; 14 pages; download size: 1293 KB) Download

Previous research defines a Design Process Communication Methodology that specifies an organizational and technological environment necessary for improving the efficiency and effectiveness of design processes. From Points of Departure in Human Computer Interaction, Knowledge Management, Process Modeling, and Design Theory, the authors have derived specifications categorized by the characteristics: Transparent, Modular, Searchable, Usable, Scalable, Incentivized, Computable, and Framed. This proposal seeks support for deploying the Process Integration Platform (PIP) web tool to measure the impact of this methodology. The proposal explains how the authors intend to use PIP in student and professional design charettes, and professional case studies to measure impact on defined metrics for process efficiency and effectiveness. The authors hypothesize that the resulting improvements to efficiency and effectiveness will increase the financial, environmental, and social value delivered by the AEC industry.

9. CIFE Calendar 2009-10

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