Ryan McMahon is the director and general manager of Informed Design at Autodesk.

According to UN-Habitat, the world needs to build 96,000 new affordable homes every day to house the estimated 3 billion people who will need access to adequate housing by 2030. It’s also often noted that the construction industry is one of the most wasteful, responsible for nearly 40 percent of global CO2 emissions.

McMahon believes that industrialized construction can play a major role in alleviating both problems. “We have to take advantage of repeatability so we can take advantage of scale and all the benefits that come from that,” he says. “I can optimize my processes, reduce waste, improve quality and create safer work environments.”

Industrialized construction can currently be found in many areas of infrastructure. Steel has always been manufactured and delivered for assembly onsite. Precast concrete often is now selected over in-situ pours because the end product is much more reliable. Bridges can be manufactured in parts and assembled onsite. Modular homes and shelters are gaining popularity as a solution to homelessness and affordable housing crises.

All of these would be made simpler and easier to use if they were better incorporated into the design process. McMahon and Autodesk Informed Design are looking to make that happen.

“The capabilities are really about making sure we make better decisions early on in the design process,” adds McMahon. “When we make design choices about a building, infrastructure, water systems, etc., can we make sure those are based on something that is known, accurate and known manufacturable? How do we inform the design process?”

The functional premise is, according to McMahon, “if I make a lot of something that goes into many different buildings or many different projects, can I make that available to an architect at design time so they can interact?”

Making the Connection

The context of Autodesk’s solution is within a single organizational boundary: Autodesk Construction Cloud (ACC). When users define a building product, they publish it into ACC into a project and folder to specify their catalog of components. Architects working on a project can discover the building products by navigating to that project and folder to find the available catalog of components.

“You pick the template and building product, and you’re shown a form with the controls you can adjust in customizing this particular thing,” adds McMahon. Designers are constrained to only components the supplier knows how to make. Therefore, the architect knows they have the accuracy of a manufactured element, so project certainty goes up and risk goes down.

Going Public

Although Informed Design currently only catalogs products for ACC, McMahon believes there’s a major opportunity to make manufactured elements publicly available to all design systems.

“If I make a lot of a product and I support many different projects, I think there’s a compelling value to make my building products publicly discoverable,” he explains. “So as an architect, I could look up on a publicly discoverable catalog all the suppliers of a similar kind of product and try them out within the scope of my project. And then you start to unlock a whole bunch of other types of value. What’s the incremental cost of sales? If somebody can discover our products and they design with those products, I’ve effectively won that seat. I think there’s potential down the road of working across that organizational boundary and making the catalog of products publicly discoverable. At some point, maybe there’s a construction marketplace where all of this enables commerce.”

Repeatable Sustainability

McMahon steadfastly believes that manufacturing leads to better outcomes for sustainability. “If I can get to repeatability, I can optimize my process, which means I can reduce my waste,” he notes. “If I have less waste, that’s good for the planet.”

Repeatability also results in improved quality, taking advantage of the latest and best technologies and materials to achieve better performance.

“We have an opportunity to explore what’s possible with new materials that might not work in the traditional ways we build today,” he adds. “There’s a tremendous amount of open-ended areas we can explore now when you’re working in a factory environment, when you are productizing what you’re making and trying to take advantage of all of those elements.”