June 21, 2018

Manifesto for Architecture as a Platform

When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for all members of the building industry to dissolve political restraints and to reinvent themselves to create a lasting harmony between nature and humanity, forging a clear path toward slowing and reversing the negative impact we make on the environment. We seek to enable business process changes that improve efficiency and reduce waste through a declaration supporting open standards.

The path is self-evident, all machine-readable data should be accessible as machine-readable data. The alternatives are paths to inefficiency and wasted resources.

We give data a purpose and a context, to create the information needed to understand and improve our world. When widely accessible, such information enhances knowledge-based decision making, integrates across many industries, increases the collective knowledge of civilization and supports better use of our shared planet to promote the rights of all people to a sustainable, healthy life on Earth.

The time is now to come together in a united way that enables us to meet these objectives. We endorse and implore the alliances of building industry organizations to support Information independence regardless of country, industry name or standard being used.

Architecture must be treated as a platform that supports the objectives of this manifesto:
1. We strive to share data across the lifecycle of projects by making our work part of the broader ecosystem to promote the urban agenda.
2. We actively use information, tools, processes, and design thinking to have a positive impact on everything in the built environment.
3. Each of us is an agent of change to connect data to the human narrative as we design and manage for the future of our world's ecosystems.

Signed by participants at the AIA Conference on Architecture
TH403 - Architecture as a Platform for the Urban Agenda
June 21, 2018 - 9:45am-11:15am 

Stephen Hagan, FAIA
Finith Jernigan, FAIA
Kimon Onuma, FAIA

1

​Identify repetitive tasks
​— 
automate them

2

Identify 
thick data tasks 
— 
expand them

3

Adopt an 
app-centric approach

4

Transform into a knowledge and data driven platform for architecture

1 - ​Identify repetitive tasks — automate them

  1. Any tabular data. (Excel, CSV)
  2. Convert narrative information that is more suited to tables.
  3. Create standard naming and numbering conventions.
  4. Define authoritative source data.
  5. Guide owners and clients to do the same with their data.
  6. Capture rules and logic into databases.

2 - Capture architectural knowledge into data-driven knowledge bases

  1. Differentiate between machine readable raw data and knowledge.
  2. Define how to share this data internally in your organization and with external partners and clients.
  3. Identify ways how this knowledge can be used beyond the traditional design and construction process.
  4. Guide owners  on how to more efficiently use their knowledge and data to support the life cycle of projects.

3 - Adopt an app-centric approach for architecture

  1. Do not get “married” to any application, treat the apps as disposable and focus on getting your data into any app.
  2. Guide your application vendors to open up their data to enable other apps to use the same data.
  3. Build your own apps to solve what you need.
  4. Build apps for the entire life cycle.

4 - Transform into a knowledge and data driven platform for architecture

  1. There should be more of focus on knowledge and data. 
  2. Building and data architecture must be of equal importance.
  3. The AIA as an organization can be the leader for the architectural platform to support the profession.
  4. Start simple, think big and implement in stages using agile methodologies.
  5. Share, collaborate, open source and find ways of expanding architectural knowledge.