It was a three year road to this opportunity with Stantec. I came to the corporation within one of the business lines that used a lot of BIM technology and got access to virtual reality, augmented reality and mobile app development through the Creativity and Innovation Program. After continuing to appear in a number of the research initiatives, the conversation of "innovative technology" started to happen with senior leaders.
There had been an opening for a Director role for technology that I applied for with a 9 year plan for the business line that I was in (employing a little over five thousand architects and engineers). I didn't get that opportunity but the role I got was far more interesting... starting a formal research and implementation team at Stantec.
The team collaborates with many technology startups and experts outside the industry of AEC to gleen insights for technology development and truly cutting edge applications.
The Innovative Technology Development Team would have three focuses...
Advanced Visualization
Computational Design
Data Visualization
Each of the three focuses make a continual effort to understand the culture within each of the different business lines and find the right technology for each group. With so many unique work deliverable at Stantec, consideration must be given to legacy of delivery and unique skill sets developed within each sector and business line.
The Innovative Technology Development Team had the pleasure of having Marcella Bonanomi spend a portion of her Doctoral Thesis work with us in 2017 to study the hierarchy of the corporation and how economies of scale could be achieved with technology support and delivery. Below is a video that was one of the first explorations of how the entire corporation of 23,000 employees are structured.
The team continues and we've grown far beyond just myself. I'm very fortunate to have a team of eager and intelligent professionals that want to find the best uses of technology and build interoperable solutions for many forms of business.
Our current focuses are on how different disciplines interact with one another and removing redundancy in referencing. Often times, teams are forced to duplicate work or recreate work to have workflows in their preferred software. We're investigating problems like that along with difficult design challenges that require more sophisticcated uses of technology like Project Fractal or Grasshopper wtihin Rhino.
Full time members: Alyssa Haas, Achintya Bhat, Rael Romero and Chuck Lousnbury
UBC Interns : Marcella Bonanomi, Helina Merkub Gebru and Jatin Maheshwary
Innovative Technology Development Team's first Halloween, 2017, We were computer errors!