Re: [bsp-forum] Your thoughts on a working agenda

["Deborah MacPherson" <debmacp@xxxxxxxxx>]

Thanks everyone for pinning this down. It can be a narrow scope. I've CC to the list because we are losing ideas and information offline.

I had brief meetings with a couple architects at WDG today. We are going to meet next week to evaluate the models provided by OPS and they do not fully understand the context of BPS. A clear, concise mission statement is needed for our organization to participate. Nevertheless, enough is understood to say the approach will be to apply a checklist that is a hybrid of our 7 checklists to the building models, questions and evaluation criteria the state of California and NIST fire research lab might have. Its lucky the examples being looked at and considered are not our own buildings or contractors so liabilities of the right design and what the contractor actually delivered are irrelevant. We know there will be failures. We do not know how to pre-answer, pre-format or prioritize parts of the construction documents to be reliable and accurate for local jurisdictions or Owners in the future. We don't know how to write future QA/QC into the construction documents for the Contractor to deliver at substantial completion or another set deadline when documents change their state.  Our task is to try and figure out what decisions should to be automated versus thought through by a person. We will not and cannot leave everything up to automated checking because every building is brought out from thin air. People might make errors instead of taking readings which is where the whole judgement and expertise part comes in. Put plainly, its important for certain kinds of information to expire from the construction documents because relying on real time computer reports might not be correct or as intended. 

WDG will not take a stab at the explaining the red arrows in the museum design process in time for Vancouver because these are uncapturable human ideas, not construction documentation or the project delivery process outside of face to face meetings. Capturing, explaining, or recording what the red arrows mean is the realm of Accuracy&Aesthetics.

The FLIPP explainers could be used for BSP purposes right away if the group can provide input, output and sets of basic criteria to David Cox to run them through his logical structures. Toby, Michelle, and Bob have seeded this field with rich material to work with. The place and time to collaborate and make things happen with SMARTcodes and ICC could be BIMstorm, it wont get done at Vancouver but holes and weaknesses could be made evident. 

The questions from Huntington Beach, NIST, and Toby are really hard.  WDG will stick with separating fact from fiction in the documents themselves.  There is a lot we cannot see to evaluate these buildings properly, for example set backs or height limits that normally determine how to establish the proportions and locations of fire rated partitions and exit paths.  We get the use groups from the Owner when a project starts and comply with local jurisdictions and their code modifications, everything proceeds from there, these are upper level performance requirements the design conforms to.  That set point is probably all that needs to be known for most purposes of future building service performance requirements. 

I think we should all clearly and publicly state our motivations for working on this on the wiki. I am confused by the reaction to OOR on Slashdot.  If BSP was to work there would also need to be an architecture of ontologies to get the information to work together in certain ways.  I don't think these are big brother type operations, exactly the opposite.  We should produce statements and reports that the reasons and results are not to take over the world. Personally, the motivation at WDG is to create a relational database for everything since 1938, much which is not digitized (I am the first museum designer to work there),every single detail and checklist entry is a subject of intense discussion ala Ontolog Forum but most people don't know how to find anything. At Accuracy&Aesthetics the simple is wish for a new computer and Archicad. 

Talk tomorrow

On Thu, May 29, 2008 at 8:43 PM, Considine, Toby (Campus Services IT) <Toby.Considine@xxxxxxx> wrote:

Thanks, Bob

 

Here is what I hear when talking to commercial building owners…

 

1)      No one will pay a penny more in rent for "Green"

2)      If rent is identical, renters will choose sustainability over not sustainable.

 

Given these facts, there is no reason a commercial building owner would ever opt for any extra expense for improved performance. Green/Sustainable must exist at the same price point. This leads to:

 

1)      RMI philosophy that price will actually win of you do it right

2)      Incorporating improved performance into BIM will deliver better buildings (see 1) but there is a lot of existing stock.

3)      The value of better buildings must be expressed in some way that is monetizable and provable.

 

To me, this sounds like building service performance. Imagine, for a moment, an Effective Ventilation Index (EVI). Imagine a Comfort Factor (CF) derived from Temperature/Humidity. Now imagine an occupancy curve (OC) derived from some combination of scheduled activities and security access. (EVI/OC) * CF = Healthy Office Building Index (HOBI).

 

In this scenario:

 

1)      Owner could request HOBI of .90 (where 1.0 is optimum) as a design intent.

2)      SF-HOBI could be computed during massing (Early decisions)

3)      Energy use for a given HOBI could be derived from industry indices thus improving energy models

4)      Facility System Integrator would be charged with mapping innards of control system to deliver EVI and CF.

5)      Live metering per SF delivers energy use

6)      EVI can be delivered automatically as part of self conditioning systems. If EVI is inaccurate, there is accountability for that in Facility System Integrator bid.

7)      EVI can be delivered to tenants as a 3^rd party QOS

8)      ASHRAE, instead of writing Enterprise software, could be tasked with defining EVI

 

Now that does not mean  that I have any idea of the proper HOBI or even EVI. But I believe having a way to talk about this, about building services, is the first step. Moving contractors into a performance world where they must deliver those numbers is 2A. Convincing commercial building owners that a 0.91 HOBI will face lower vacancies that a 0.854 HOBI is step 2B. Writing HOBI into QOA side bets in leases is step 3. Thereafter the process of performant buildings is self-sustaining and accelerating.

 

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"When one door closes, another opens; but we often look so long and so regretfully upon the closed door that we do not see the one which has opened for us." -- Alexander Graham Bell

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Toby Considine Chair, OASIS oBIX TC Facilities Technology Office University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, NC

Email: Toby.Considine@ unc.edu Phone: (919)962-9073 http://www.oasis-open.org blog: www.NewDaedalus.com

 

 

*************************************************
Deborah L. MacPherson
Projects Director, Accuracy&Aesthetics
Specifier, WDG Architecture PLLC

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