Autodesk Forma Team
In this blog post, we share insights from our conversation with Mike DeOrsey, Digital Practice Manager at Stantec, a global leader in design and engineering consultancy.
Delving into sustainability challenges, Mike details the difficulties that is posed by calculating carbon too late in the building design process. He shares the firm’s excitement about Forma and its embodied carbon tool, emphasizing its potential to investigate the implications of decisions on carbon from the early stages of design. Mike also highlights the benefits of AI and real-time analysis, underscoring how they enable more informed decision-making during the design process, all ultimately helping in the reduction of the built environment’s carbon impact.
Watch the full story here.
[Transcript]
Mike DeOrsey : I’m Mike DeOrsey, Digital Practice ,Manager at Stantec. Stantec is a global design engineering consulting practice of about 28,000 employees in 400 locations. Autodesk approached Stantec to partner with them on the carbon analysis tools in the Autodesk Forma Cloud. And they came to us because of our expertise in sustainability.
One of the big problems that we’ve had with the design process as a whole is calculating carbon, embodied and operational carbon is not known until we are quite well down the path of the design process. Once we have everything pulled together and we know exactly what the building is going to look like, then we are able to actually have enough information to accurately calculate those numbers. There’s a lot of manual application, there’s a lot of Excel spreadsheets and there’s a lot of very detailed analysis. The problem is we no longer have the ability to change anything because we’re too far down the design path.
And I think this is one of the reasons we’re so excited about Forma and the carbon tooling that is embedded within it, because that is now giving us the ability to really investigate the impact of our decisions on carbon early in the design process. That is meaning that we can now actually make changes and react to that information. I mean, the whole benefit of AI being infused into the industry is being able to make better informed decisions at a point where they actually are meaningful.
What generally that means is we’re taking that extra time and reinvesting it into the project to take on higher value tasks. Really what we’re delivering is a higher quality product because of the efficiency gains. I think the biggest opportunity for technology to manage our carbon footprint is by having tools like Forma that are going to allow us to really real time analyze our designs as we’re designing them.
Being able to have that sort of real time information, that feedback, that analysis as we’re doing the design work is really what’s going to enable us to make those changes to improve our designs in a way that is going to achieve the goals that we need to in order to reduce the carbon impact of the built environment.