Innovation Design Consortium Names Acelab Co-Development Partner
IDC is where the profession’s leading firms pool technology investment on problems none of them can solve alone. Its members include SOM, HOK, HKS, NBBJ, ZGF, CannonDesign, Corgan, DLR Group, SmithGroup, Page, Gresham Smith and HLW, among others. When IDC’s members align on an open standard, the industry’s leading firms establish a common foundation that benefits the entire industry. Together, IDC’s 46 member firms employ an estimated 30,000 design professionals and deliver more than 10,000 projects a year. Organized as a public benefit corporation and guided by technology leaders nominated by member firms, IDC develops shared standards, tools and partnerships across data sharing, performance and sustainability, operational efficiency and project delivery.
Materials are roughly 40 to 50 percent of the construction cost of every building, and the data behind them has never had a shared ontology, a common definition of what a material is, what describes it and how those attributes relate. Attribute names, units and certification records differ from one manufacturer to the next. Every firm rebuilds the same product information in a silo, and none of it carries from one project to the next or from one partner to another. Bad data cost the global construction industry an estimated $1.85 trillion in 2020 and drove 14 percent of all rework, according to research from Autodesk and FMI. On a live project that looks like RFIs chasing information that already exists, submittal cycles that restart at every handoff, change orders when a specified product fails a requirement, and rework when the wrong material arrives on site.
North American design firms specify more than $700 billion in building products a year, by Acelab’s estimate. A mid-size commercial project alone involves over 1,000 distinct product decisions. While design authoring, project management and procurement have each been standardized by major software platforms, material data and compliance have not.
IDC selected Acelab on two counts. Acelab has built the largest product data ecosystem in the industry, a schema spanning more than 250,000 products and a network of over 20,000 design firms and manufacturers, which gives the standard a working foundation on day one rather than a blank page. And Acelab pairs that data with end-to-end workflow tools that put it to work. Specifications, schedules, submittals and compliance documentation generate from the material decision itself and stay in sync as it changes, so firms spend less time rebuilding product information and chasing paperwork and more time on design.
The need for a standard now extends past design firms. Real estate owners and developers, who carry the long-term cost of every material decision, are also standardizing their portfolios on structured material data and on platforms like Acelab, so what gets specified, installed and maintained finally reconciles.
The standard is built on an open ontology that gives every participant, manufacturer, firm, owner and contractor, the same structure for material data. A manufacturer publishes product data once and every firm, owner and contractor reads it without reentry. Embodied carbon and certification data roll up across a project while selections are still open. Acelab calls this material intelligence, and IDC’s standard is what makes it portable across the industry.
“Other industries solved this decades ago: banking has ACH, healthcare has HL7. Architecture never agreed on what its data means, so the data moves but the meaning doesn’t,” said Jim Smell, Technical Product Manager at the Innovation Design Consortium. “IDC is defining that shared vocabulary, what a material is, what attributes describe it, how it relates to performance and compliance, and partnering with companies like Acelab to prove it works in the real world.”
“I watched this industry standardize how it models buildings. It never standardized the materials that go into them, and materials are half the money,” said Dave Lemont, Executive Chairman of Acelab and former CEO of Revit. “IDC is the first body with the scale and the mandate to fix that, because it is the largest firms themselves deciding what the standard should be. Acelab is here to make sure it is built on real product data and that firms can actually use it on day one.”