Integrating Location and Design

The following article is an edited and abridged version of the presentation delivered as the keynote for the 2019 Engineering Summit at the ESRI User Conference in San Diego in July 2019. Given the interest expressed by many of the participants I have decided to share this message with a broader audience.

It’s a pleasure to be speaking to you about something that I find both exciting and perplexing. The integration of location and design and what this means for the infrastructure of the future. I say exciting because new technologies, new ways of working, innovation and creation are what drives me; it’s what I love about my job. Nevertheless, it also perplexes me because it’s all new. It’s unknown. And it’s unknown on a level many of us haven’t seen before and are unlikely to see again. We are at an inflection point.

So in order to look forward I’m going ask you to briefly look back with me.

20 years ago, in one of my earliest roles at GHD, I unintentionally looked down a similar road to the one we are looking down today.... The Future!

I was working on a business case for a new facility for a client. They had expressed a desire to relocate a large format printing press, a lot larger than the one shown below, into their new state of the art facility they were considering.

I asked, what seems like a simple question today “do we need to print maps” but 20 years ago, this was a pretty radical idea to consider, particularly for an organization who believed they existed to produce and print maps. It was radical enough to take many years for that question to be answered and the project to proceed. What do you think they came back with?  They recognized that the world was shifting and their core purpose was actually not map printing - but the production of the spatial information that could be used to generate the maps and a collection of potentially new products and services. The printing press was destined for the scrap heap.

A lot has changed in 20 years. So how did we get to where we are today?

As you know, the use of spatial information can be dated back to just about the dawn of time. It has been used for many things, like empire building, managing pandemics, for academic purposes, land use management, and weather mapping. All very specific applications. Then, when the smart phone came into our lives and the power of global positioning systems was realized - these two events literally put spatial information into the palm of everyone’s hand. But today, spatial information is no longer used just for specific things. It’s used for everything. It’s application has grown into something that we rely upon in every aspect of our lives. In research, in every aspect of business, in governments and for most of us in our personal life, it’s an everyday tool. We have moved from maps as paper products to quantitative insights.

I’ve read as much as 80% of business data is said to contain a location component. Location intelligence now supports every area of business.

Design has followed a similar evolution. Until recently, design has always been a process involving a singular thing, an object, something tangible. As the Harvard Business Review succinctly said, Loewy designed trains, Lloyd-Wright designed buildings, Eames designed furniture, Chanel designed couture, Rand designed logos, Kelly designed products, most famously the mouse for the Apple computer. All designers, all working in very specific fields. It was a craft, a discipline, and there was a finite number of fields. Design however has evolved over time, into a way of thinking, from a physical process to a completely new discipline. We now hear about journey maps, scenario planning, strategic foresight and future thinking. Like location, it now permeates every part of our lives. We use it in research, in every aspect of business, in governments and for most of us in our personal life. It’s an everyday tool. Design thinking is a methodology that we now use to solve any complex problem. And infrastructure projects would probably rate as some of the most complex problems around. As both location and design have evolved, their paths have blurred and the optimization of one now requires the other. An unlikely pair perhaps like peanut butter and jelly or vegemite and toast.

The Intersection of Location and Design

It is at that point when location and design intersected that the future we now imagine became possible. The infrastructure provides the form, location intelligence tells the story. This is not just a story about what is happening today - but the history and possible futures for the site or assets on the site- its past land forms, its historical uses, contaminants, natural features etc and its opportunities - proposed uses; planning and environment constraints, alternatives and performance characteristics. This integration gives us a holistic view of an asset throughout its entire lifecycle from design, construction to maintenance and disposal.

In the past, we have looked for solutions that make our life simpler, that make us more comfortable. As we move into the future however, we are moving into embracing the unknown, taking us out of our comfort zone, developing the complex. We will explore the best and worst ideas and we will go beyond the best idea using the power of Generative Design concepts. In the past the highest paid person in the room, made the decision about which way we go, moving forward it will be the best idea that decides. This means we will see a shift away from hierarchies defining the way we work to working in networks. Traditionally we have avoided mistakes, moving forward will we learn from our mistakes. Traditionally, we have wanted to be right. Moving forward we hope to be right.

The Future

It’s a rare time in history for all of us with access to tools we’ve never had before, making the future a difficult thing to predict. Nevertheless, as unpredictable as it may be there are a few things of we can expect.

• The pace of change will continue to accelerate
• The way we respond to challenges will be fundamentally different to how we have responded in the past.
• Business models are changing and will continue to change
• Creativity and innovation will be at the core of our problem solving
• Our industry and business strategies will be inherently linked to organisations that are capable of rapid experimentation, testing and innovation
• We will embrace new materials and these new materials will be chosen because of how they respond to their surroundings or the job they are being tasked to do
• We will continue to develop ways to use our finite natural resources more efficiently

Balanced Framework

One of the things we have recognized is the need for our organizations and our industry to embrace the complexities of the future and plot a considered journey forward.  This journey involves understanding how the emergence of technology can assist us in solving the complex infrastructure challenges facing us all and how we can effectively activate the people in organizations and our projects to effectively adapt to and adopt new ways of working. Over the course of the coming days at this ESRI User Conference you will see the possibility that is created by the application of the amazing technology that exists in the world today.  

Ultimately, none of this matters without the people. We are talking about new ways of working, new tools, new leadership models.

Success depends on connecting people, shifting mindsets, embracing the sense of possibility. We will need to equip the people we lead and ourselves, with the skills and mindset needed to adapt to these changes. What are some of the ways we can do this?

One of the concepts at the core of delivering the infrastructure of the future, involves integrated project delivery, sharing information as a single point of truth. This makes collaboration fundamental but we are talking about more than just the technical solutions we adopt to enable collaboration to happen. We recognize the act of collaborating requires skills that are quite contrary to the traditional ways of working. This means changing habits like hanging on to knowledge, resisting sharing progress and working in silos. It requires mutual trust and the recognition of team efforts as much as individual contributions. We need to remove the perception that there is a risk in sharing what you know.

Learning

We need to upskill our people with respect to new technology, rapidly and at scale. But for us it’s not just about upskilling them to be able to use new technology. We need to both employ people with other skills and help our people also develop what for many of them are new skills, like those needed to evaluate the accuracy and usefulness of information and skills to embrace data driven decision making.

How people learn will also be different. This means an emphasis on self-guided learning and skills development. The framework described is based on ensuring that we effectively deal with the mindset, skillset and toolsets necessary to ultimately achieve our vision. We are creating an environment of a willingness to try new things, an acceptance of continuous change and personal improvement.

But we also accept this learning will too evolve because the reality is, everyone will influence the evolution of the skills, the technology and the tools we use to deliver projects. The jobs most of our children will be doing don’t exist today. What we come to teach will be solving problems that don’t exist today.

Client and Market Understanding

So what does the future for our industry look like to me?

We know our clients are asking for lean delivery of their projects. This means reducing duplicity and redundancy, improving consistency of information, breaking down silos across projects and adopting commonality of processes. But as always, there are constraints like tight timelines and high visibility. As we move towards smart cities, 3D models of above and below the ground with data and time, making them 5D models, and whole of life services, what are we doing as we move into the future.

We see our future deeply linked to that of our clients. They too are facing new challenges and requiring new services as we move rapidly towards the infrastructure of the future. Some have developed frameworks and are part way on their journey, while others are yet to understand what it will mean for their business and how it will continue to shape them into the future. As with us, the opportunities created by the integration of location and design changes so many things for them like the way they work, how they collaborate to deliver projects and how they manage information throughout an asset’s lifecycle. We believe it’s critical we engage with them to join them on their journey. We acknowledge however, that the nature of that journey is very different to anything we have shared with them before.

The integration of location and design gives us an unprecedented opportunity to share with our clients a completely immersive experience, throughout the lifecycle of a project. We can engage our clients and their stakeholders in every stage of a project, enhancing the connection we share and our understanding of them.  This understanding helps us to continually align our client’s journey with our strategic outcomes and determine that information which is most critical to our clients. Location intelligence, and the collaboration made possible by it, will provide invaluable insight into what is driving our client’s satisfaction, help us to effectively manage expectations, remove pain points and enable us to engage in continuous innovation with them.

As an industry, we will have access to an ever-increasing level of intelligence and be able to provide insight for clients across every layer of our businesses and I believe it won’t be too long before we find ourselves in a completely new place with our clients, solving new problems in new ways.

Conclusion

Earlier in the presentation I reflected on the evolution of location and design. Both originated from specialist disciplines or fields of study but now require the skills of generalists that are capable of interpreting and synethising multiple information sources and constraints to be able to connect the dots between the specifics of a discipline and the complexities of infrastructure challenges.

We have a unique opportunity for our infrastructure to be designed and operated in a real world context. By context I mean the context of its history, its location and how it operates, or could operate into the future. Effectively creating infrastructure that exists in its x, y, z, time and other dimensions.

So to conclude I would like to go back to where I began. 20 years ago I asked a question that now seems totally sensible and I’d like to leave you pondering the thought “what questions do we need to start asking now, armed with the integration of location and design, to help us design where we are in the future”. Keep asking yourself this question over the next few days as you hear about the many things that are shaping the future of our industry. Thank you.