Forging the future of design technology via smart buildings, AI and beyond

Since the start of fall, our teams have held a Smart Buildings Summit, an Artificial Intelligence Hackathon and identified numerous new tech and data tools the firm intends to build starting in 2024. 

"Technology is integral to the design process and new tools are helping us test more possibilities, make decisions more rapidly, and create better solutions for our clients in health, learning, science, workplace and more,” said Brooke Grammier, our Chief Information Officer. "Technology has changed so much about design, and yet, we're still just scratching the surface. We're determined to be at the forefront of unlocking the full power of design technology – and these recent events have set us on that invigorating path." 

Here's a deeper look at some of our recent design technology summits and advancements, with a look toward what comes next.

The team also had the opportunity to tour Cisco's PENN1 office, one of the most technologically advanced workplaces in the world, featuring 5,000 user data points that help the building fully respond to its occupants and hybrid workforce. 
 
"This was an incredible experience,” said Paul Kondrat, co-leader of our engineering practice. "We've made strides in smart buildings previously and created exciting tools and projects, but to have all our thought leaders in the same room for two days proved remarkable. We're capable of so much and committed to growing even stronger. I can't wait to see how our smart building capabilities evolve to better support clients and end users in the months ahead." 

Our team emerged from the summit with a clear plan on how we'll further advance our smart building design capabilities in the years ahead. The plan includes clear efforts to take on more smart building projects, build deeper connections with industry partners and technology integrators, hire new smart building leaders and build a clear narrative on how this can help our clients navigate the future.

The two-day event kicked off with a presentation from Fred Premji, a creative machine learning consultant and mentor for MIT’s Applied Data Science & Machine Learning program. Following that session, the full group talked through different pain points and opportunities across CannonDesign and how they might be addressed via AI.

Individuals had time to reflect on their own ideas and then pitched these to their fellow participants. Afterwards the preferred ones were selected, leading to the formation of teams. This marked the start of the hackathon. Over the course of two days, hackers collaborated, innovated, and pushed each other to develop exciting projects. 

Beyond these focused summits, our technology team has also been taking bold steps to develop new technology solutions for all realms of design. In partnership with Amp, our firm's in-house incubator, the team launched an innovation platform to source ideas. Already, a prompt around new tech and data dashboards has yielded four exciting ideas CannonDesign plans to invest in starting in Jan. 2024. 

Technology has incredible power to transform the design process and elevate the solutions we create. As noted above, we're just scratching the surface, and we're excited to work with our teams and clients to advance breakthrough design technology ideas and tools moving forward.