As the AEC industry is approaching a stage of maturity in the digital transformation journey, AKT II’s p.art team has been pioneering it since its inception over 25 years ago. Data as an underlying driver of design, informing decisions earlier on and addressing issues from the macro scale of social impact to the micro scale of structural, environmental, and sustainable optimization has been the principal focus of this practice driven research team. Below 3 main examples are chosen to describe how tapping into intangible knowledge hidden in internal or external datasets, helped exploiting it into targets, processes and design solutions. The intention is to critique the current availability of datasets, how to understand and avoid data bias, and finally the hurdles to overcome into getting from raw data to implemented design drivers. Those pioneering exercises are exploring the novel opportunities provided by the hybridization of processes and cross disciplinary datasets, to enhance the built environment and to learn from the more granular availability of relevant data. In an effort to provide support to the architectural industry, the examples covered below are showcasing how technology can be leveraged to expedite the achievement of some of the Sustainable development goals set by the U.N., specifically in “Part 1”, we will demonstrate how accessing an existing dataset and using state of the art software visualization techniques is supporting the team in highlighting issues and potential mitigations of goals 11 (sustainable cities and communities), 13 (climate action), 14 (life below water) and 15 (life on land). “Part 2” is showcasing the opportunity on one side to make existing datasets available to the public through a mobile app, and on the other end, to use the same app to gather specific user data. In “Part 3” we will demonstrate how novel design techniques helped us design a waterless garden in the desertic climate of Sharjah, proving that using an inter-disciplinary approach, mixing architectural design, building physics knowledge, computational fluid dynamics simulation and parametric modelling, helped the team predicting the best geometric output for the garden landscaping that provided a recreation of a natural environment to facilitate indigenous plants growth, effectively targeting U.N. goals 2 (zero hunger), 3 (good health and wellbeing), 7 (affordable and clean energy), 11 (sustainable cities and communities), 12 (responsible consumption and production), 13 (climate action) and 15 (life on land).
