Autodesk Forma Team
As Arcadis, a global leader in design and engineering, advances its sustainability goals to reach net zero by 2035, we had the opportunity to chat with their Digital Lead, Caoimhe Loftus.
In our conversation, Caoimhe shares her team’s goal to democratize sustainability, ensuring it isn’t an expert-only task. She openly details how the use of Forma has enhanced her team’s approach to sustainability, empowering them to understand better the implications of their design-decisions right from project inception.
Check out the full conversation below!
[Transcript]
Caoimhe Loftus: Hi, I’m Caoimhe Loftus. I’m Digital Lead at Arcadis, and I bridge the work of our architecture and digital teams. As architects, we’re having to change the way we work to incorporate sustainability. There’s a whole opportunity for upskilling around terminology and software. It’s a challenge because we’re generalists, but really important that we have this information to hand so we can harness it in our designs.
The goal for us is that everyone can engage with sustainability on their projects. We don’t want this to be an expert task. For all projects to be sustainable, we need everyone to understand the implications of their design decisions.
What I enjoy most about using Forma is how easy it is to use. It doesn’t require lots of training to get up and running. I really enjoy the visual feedback, it’s great to learn more about my design decisions as I go. It makes design support available for architects from the very start of their decision making process. Supplementing the existing skills of the architect.
One example I point to is a project in Egypt where we used Forma to help inform our design decisions. So, this is a very hot climate and we used the wind analysis to inform our design process using passive design strategies. For this particular project team, they were able to get that feedback instantly rather than having to wait for the feedback. So they were able to iterate on the design in real time.
Our sustainability consultants have really embraced Forma. They’re delighted that they can empower our project teams to run their own initial analysis, which means they come to the table more informed for more detailed discussion and analysis.