Creating the Innovative Technology Development Team at Stantec

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!

Robson Square | UBC Student Entrance

University of British Columbia has one of the most interesting sites in the city of Vancouver, right in the middle of downtown at the most public square in the community - Robson Square. The site is incredibly contentious, with many parties having a say in what happens on the land. 

I had the pleasure of working with Designer, Kim Glauber and Project Architect, Doug Hamming; both of whom had been on the project a couple of years before I came along. The project needed to produce a set of schematic drawings to go another round of public engagement sessions and I was given the opportunity to help make this a Revit project.

Interestingly, there was a surveying company in town that had lidar scanned the site and covered the point cloud into an IFC model that I was then able to bring into Revit. I used a deductive modeling approach to capturing the glazing system in Revit so the glass box could have a parametric relationship (hosted by reference planes) between the complex primary structure. 

Kim, was crucial in the BIM at the Human Scale research to figuring out the spherical output from 3DSMax and made this one of the first projects at Stantec to be showcased in mobile Virtual Reality. 

This project was a great showcase of modeling approach and was selected as a Case Study Project to present at the 2016 North American RTC Conference in Phoenix, Arizona. 

Virtual Reality Study at Ziegler Cooper

In the spring of 2014, my ongoing relationship with WorldViz turned into a business case for a short stint of research and development at Ziegler Cooper. WorldViz used the proprietary "Vizard" game engine to run the models from digital architecture models. The workflow wasn't quite ready for large scale commercial work as the model optimization process required the geometry to a low amount of polygons and the yield from Revit was too high and too much rework for office projects.

The research did bring the Oculus SDK1 into the office and everyone enjoyed the initial real demos as a part of the research. Movement was tracked via a Kinect sensor.

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E-Catalyst Database | Interface Design

While at Equipment Collaborative, I did the research and user experience design for a new database interface. The team had long been using a custom built solution out of Access (Microsoft product) that was long past its capability. 

My research looked at linear versus non-linear database platforms, how the back end solution dictated front end ability and all of the various needs of the database. The intention was to release it as a web app that could be used on a iPad. 

Workflows Researched:

• Equipment Data-basing
• Manufacture meta-data formats
• Procurement Process 
• Project Planning Process
• Product Documentation Process

The design never came to fruition but the equipment planners all thought it would have been a great solution for their workflow. As a first foray into UX work, I came to appreciate the complex nature of database backend solutions and how that could effect overall design goals.