Kimon Onuma: Enabling the "Information" in BIM at Onuma, Inc.

I am your host, Amy Peck. We have a fantastic guest today, came on a new mom who is the founder and president of Numa , Inc. Welcome Killarney . So tell us a little bit about, I want to hear about the company first, but then I'd love to hear about your journey to why this industry and how you landed here.

It's called BEM storm, which is an online charette workshop , um, more than a decade ago. And then we also have other software have a lot of different software that we developed as well, too .

I grew up in Japan and Italy, so all over the place, a lot of exposure to different environments , uh, cities, and that's always interested in art . So that got me there as an architect. But , um, as I was working as an architect, I realized that there's certain inefficiencies in the industry that we can fix and started building solutions for ourselves internally. Um, one interesting story that triggered that. Whereas I was saying , this was actually, when was it , late eighties?

I was sitting across the table from a client and the us army Corps of engineers, actually in Japan, negotiating a contract. And they were starting to talk about how can we reduce the contract or not to reduce the size of the paper in print, but sheets going to go off Margaret ? I said, sure, yeah, we can do that. And I can get all the postage stamp size that you really want to use things.

So it's that concept of having value in the documents that are delivered, but really the value is not really what we printed on. It's put into it. That's one, one story that got me thinking about what's this really all about how do we work through this and that kind of one thing led to another, and it's always about innovating. And we do a lot of R and D on our own. I'm very interested in just testing things out and learning from other industries too . Very important.

Architects are naturally wired to do that and kind of absorb what was going on in the environment. And we respond to it and create solutions. We build designs, we build things. So it's kind of a mixture of everything together that's suit is. What's interesting to me.

This was in the late eighties. So we started building the database, essentially capture things and then said , well, what if you apply this data to 3d? This is again like you had the 3d model and then information . So we're looking for ways to connect the dots and then building information modeling. And we jumped into it in the early nineties.

Um, and we immediately saw the potential there that, wow, this is an amazing , uh , this is going to change the world in the next couple of years Along the way of being the technology has always been of interest to me, but it's also trying to be realistic about things that you have to constantly kind of balance. Okay. Wow, this is really cool, but it really work. And can't really deliver that testing. This has been very interesting to me.

So we were building , um, we're working on traditional planning and architectural body at the time. It wasn't even called them back then, but it's essentially the same we started with , um, and with our client . It's I don't understand that yet. They're asking for the loan bowls , but I said in paper, or we want to print a perspective of this view. We said , sure, we can do that. And we had to hold back from delivering too fast when you're producing so much stuff, that it was kind of unusual.

So we ended up experimenting a lot. And as we were experimenting, we realized back then, but even the tools that were available, they didn't fulfill everything that we needed. We had to kind of build our own little pieces and we weren't really programmers. We were kind of hacking away at things now. So that's kind of gotten that mixture of the technology, the BIM part and traditional design part.

And in that journey too , as you're building software, the architecture of the software, you're trying to break logic apart and rules apart and rebuild them, which is why it's called architecture. It's very similar in many ways to the thinking of an architect, I suppose a lot of parallels here , and we can kind of just bounce back and forth between the two and experiment . So that's kind of how that mixture of wanting to build out applications for our own internal use first.

And I haven't gotten to the part of what do we do next with this, but it was really around internal interviews and it was to communicate as efficiently as possible across the world from Tokyo to California. This is again, early nineties and we were on the web in 93 . So we got early into this whole webinar. And I think what we're doing dial up , trying to send the files back and forth.

Won't need to be as compact and as efficient the file size, which means you had to be compact and efficient and the code that you like to do that as well too. So that kind of went hand in hand, but it's actually a good practice, anybody to do that doesn't have a small board, huge thing. So anyways , kind of long answer to ,

There are companies out there that are just somehow still think maybe BIM, isn't a thing. I'm not sure what the rationale is. But I think also, I think one of the challenges is that there's so much technology now and you were playing with technology right on the cusp, right? We're just, just as all of this was becoming available, but now there's this incredibly broad swath of technology that it's , it's not as advanced as we'd like it to be.

Do you think that in a way that, that is even stagnating some of growth on the practical use cases, because there's just too much for companies to experiment with

And if fights other ones , so the technology for us, and this has been true from the very beginning, which technology should be disposable. I should be able to unplug something. I don't like, like something else and build my own, buy somebody else's or consult with somebody and plug it in. So the technology, the amount of applications is going to grow , um , finding sites three years, since I mentioned box two , I had a client in the nineties that really liked the work that we did.

They liked the software that we have . Um , and we were talking about cloud back, then put it into whatever cloud, whatever, just , you know , no , you have to put it in a box that you can put this in a box, a little box will buy the application things . I don't have a box, but I'll think about it. And we're friends right now as he watches . But it's just a funny story that the expectation is that we need to buy something off the shelf and use it.

But now we're all becoming in a sense software developers, because software has become a lot easier to use and build on the web, especially then kind of plug different things together and build solutions. Um, the hardest thing I've learned through the years to the hardest thing is the coding is difficult. It's difficult to cope.

And the note , no question about that, but the more difficult thing is the logic and understanding the rules of the environment of facilities, of buildings, of engineering, all that stuff is incredibly complex with their relationships. That's exactly what architects and engineers and builders are great at. So you can actually give , give a problem to a coder. They're not going to solve it. And you have to have that kind of top combined know-how of different stakeholders together.

And that's really fascinating to me too, because there's value to be gained there from everybody. If you're willing to understand that. And as you said, it's fairly early 90 , that that was going to take off in a couple years. And it's kind of funny. Cause every two years this is going to happen. It's gonna happen. What really has frustrated me in the very beginning as an architect , I tried to go to architects perspective , look at this . This is great. Oh no, we can do this. We can do this.

Architects are incredibly creative, but we're also incredibly conservative, but we're changing and that's good, but we need to think outside the box, what can we do for designs that were kind of hesitant on the soccer or the technology thing? Oh, we'll wait till somebody builds that and they go buy it, compare the price and whatever. So I think that's another opportunity that if we think like that, it opens up completely new value chains that you can build relationship and create.

And so over the years, we've kind of migrated from kind of trying to convince the architectural committee, even though I still do. I've been very involved in that with respect to art . And I really think there's a lot of potential there, but we've shifted to owners . The reason we shifted to owners is we know that the owners can drive the discussion because they're paying for things. Yes .

So that's a , a lot of our work in the last decade has really heavily shifted to representing owners and working with the architects in between and the mix . And that I'll make sure to, I haven't even talked about our software, but it's , it's in there as well too .

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And BIM designs is proud to be a client and partner of applied software to visit asti.com . That is eight S t.com . And please let them know that feature construct in Dem designs sent you and we are back and as promised you said something that was, that was really interesting.

And I think a really important component of how we look at, you know , the role of software and even , uh, automation in the future was that, you know, the complexity of what an architect knows and understands, isn't going to be replicated in a piece of software that the software really is in fact, a tool.

And I think, you know, as we're looking at automation and all of this fears kind of rippling through the workforce saying, look, we're going to be, you know , we're going to be replaced by robots will be replaced by AI. Um , but I think we have an opportunity if we're careful and we're smart to sort of augment human potential and leave what , what really we're best at which is the creativity and the nuance of our individual industries and build machines that free us up to , to do that.

So I'm wondering if you hear that from your clients and , and just what your thoughts are in , in terms of that kind of blend of automation and human creativity.

So that can be automated too , which starts to get a little bit threatening and scary to designers maybe. And I've had this over and over, over the years, I've even used the word, the term automating architecture, just put a shot pretty man . But the intent is really not to automate it. It's really to automate as much of it. So you can spend more time that creative part. That's the fun part. That's another driver for us developing software .

I was looking for ways to automate things in design, which means you're cutting down hours. Now that's a problem in this world because we're tied at an hourly rate, which is also a problem too, because doctors don't do that. And now it's more about the value. So we're not tied enough to the value that we do. And we have to be fearless about automating the stuff that has no value, because if we don't do it , that there are others waiting, they're already doing the Googles and whatever.

They're looking all over the environment, cataloging and digitizing and standing, putting an AI in it it's already happened. So we might as well be up there on the forefront and be the leaders in that pack because there's a lot of creativity and you can't automate and never will, I think, but it'll, it'll start getting chipped away. But if we're not at the table, we're gonna basically watch it on the sidelines and that whole industry will move somewhere else.

So that's the part that I think that's the ying and yang thing going on here, but I'd see it as an opportunity. It's really an opportunity. And , um, would you frame them like that? And we're working those , there have been a lot of people that we've dealt with over the years that are very fearful of that. And it comes up sometimes in a direct way, sometimes indirect. And I could see that hurting those that think like that.

And I'm not trying to be negative about this, but I think it's more can shift our opportunity. That's what on . So it's a big transition to them storm . So over the years, because contracts for design, construction, operations even are kind of fixed their way and the deliverables and their schedules and the people that you meet , all that stuff. We said, okay, what did we step away from the contract? And we build this scenario, that's very close to the real world, but it has no contract.

And we invite others. Even our competitors, we've invited our competitors. And because I don't see anybody really better, it's more of a collaborator for talking about the same thing or competing the software. That's great, but the two together make something completely new. So in defense storm, we invite architects, owners, engineers, software developers, to solve a problem. And this happened over 12 years ago.

Now we said, okay, let's look at Los Angeles, the whole city, and kind of planning scenario on this part of the city. And you get owners into their programming here, let's do this for 48 hours. I'll know it was 24 hours, the first one and see what we can come up with and let's make it on the web. So I can go around the world and everybody can just plug in and do their thing. We had hundreds of people, several hundred actually logging in with their solutions back then.

It wasn't quite as advanced as today, but still , um, and that creativity of being able to test things outside of the contractual environment, allows us to learn, allows us to experiment, allows us to create connections with others that are like-minded that we actually do real projects with. That allows us to market ourselves in many ways , not ourselves. Everybody also was part of that market. Like, look at this, a hackathon , basically here , we're patching at the problem.

And that's created a tremendous opportunities for us, even to this day, we're doing , we're working on them storms for private . Finally, they're not most of them storms in public, but there are five of them storms that are happening right now for owners that said, Hey, we want to do this to get our internal stakeholders to understand that . So we can work with our agents more efficiently.

But the more that we open source, the more we can uncover some of the challenges, particularly with AI, because there's so many pitfalls of AI , um, especially opaque AI, and, and the more we open source, the more we can all learn from the same construct, but there's, there's still this kind of, you know, corporate veil of secrecy. And, you know, they're concerned about their shareholders, which is, which is fair, but how do we change that mindset? Say, look, this is all gonna be,

If you don't have kind of that source material, then you can't make decisions from it. So yeah , AI can do things with random data as well, too , but the more kind of, some kind of structure you have and make it accessible and make it accessible in a way that you can compete and also decide what to expose or not expose.

But as you build the architecture in the beginning to protect and proprietary and they get a bespoke or whatever , um, for yourself, then the connectivity portion is gone basically saying how to solve this all ourselves , because it's a secret stuff and we have a certain way we lay out building well.

Yeah. Okay. But , uh, the more that you can figure out how to get the data in a format that you can use yourself, your API, you know , in an open way, and then decide what to expose the outside world and then say, well, now you have some data over here. What if we connect these two data sets and you have a whole new use case, which happens all the time, because there's so much useful data in the design and construction process.

It's just tons of data on not only the data about the final BIM , the final geometry and the final what's in the building. It's all the decisions that go into it. What kind of steel that we have in the building? How do you maintain this building? So the steel doesn't fail in the concrete. Those are unfortunate things that happen because information is not easily accessible, but we should be able to capture those, the decisions that are made and then decide how to share and use them.

And if we're going to be , um, delivering buildings and facilities to our clients, I think it's our responsibility to deliver the knowledge and the decisions that went into how we built them and why we built them. But to expect from that, with the life expectancy, isn't how to maintain it and how much value there is and how much and all that stuff that's value. That's not that doesn't come back to the design and construction team because we focus so much on the physical results .

Well , here's a building, let's walk away from it, let's shred everything because it's secret stuff.

And, and, and, you know, as, as blockchain evolves, if we can get people to stop, you know , like , uh , thinking about it and just terms of this crypto gold rush with NFTs, and, you know, all of these things that are just going to be bubbles and really detract from what the core benefit of the technology is , which is effectively being a digital source of truth. That's right . You know, we can really elevate process.

And , and I would even argue that companies who have a culture of secrecy are going to be blockbuster in this next generation of, you know , corporations that are, that are kind of growing out of the technology today. Um, because, you know, even the workforce is , is demanding. That companies be more transparent. It's only a matter of time before they , they demand that they're more transparent about data.

This is a real story actually, but I'm not gonna name the client, but the data got sent by a CD that was secure, got lost and went to the wrong address. The person opened, it contacted us. It was not encrypted, all that stuff. We said , okay, if you, if you're smart about it, you can actually, and it was all bundled into one package.

So the decoupling of the data into different buckets, and then having that open ax to it, architecture that's open and then deciding who gets access to it when, and how, and is there a price, is it free? Do we collaborate? Do we, not all that stuff can happen on the fly at a very micro level. And then we can focus on the design parts that , that instead of the creativity target we talked about, or ,

Uh, and then for those who have the capacity and, or the appetite, you know, they can kind of look under the hood, they can change the source code. They, you know, they, they, they have these levels of accessibility and, you know, an ability for you to be able to access different levels based on what you

need to do. And I think, you know, w I think corporates can really take a big lesson from that. I'd love to hear some of your thoughts on, of course I spend all day every day thinking about , um, more, you know, AR VR, which I think, you know, in our, in our 3d round, you know , the irony has been that, you know, in , in your industry, in particular, your 3d industry, you had to kind of cram the ability to create onto a 2d screen.

And now we have the opportunity to actually work in 3d in a 3d environment. Um , but just like you mentioned, you know, with them like, oh, in a couple of years, it's really going to take off. We're really at just the very, very early stages of this. Uh , but I'd love to hear your thoughts on where you think immersive technology, what , what role it plays in, in this, in this future.

So the , uh, the VR hearts Williams walk around the building, whatever the AR part's really fascinating too, because you're layering the reality with other data on top of which goes back, and you have access to that other data that you have to be able to do any kind of analysis, what forget the AI, or am I just getting access to the data first once much , you can see it an AR environment. Then all of a sudden you can see behind walls and see that rebar that we're talking about earlier.

So that's really, I think it's going to be amazing, obviously the hardware and the technology is evolving, but I think it's actually accelerating in many ways in the last few years, it's kind of an interesting shift that's happening. And I've said this before to some might be completely wrong.

And then, and then you true it up with an as-built and then you give technicians, or, you know, if there's construction that needs to be done or maintenance or any retrofitting, or even a , you know, a remodel you're effectively then able to see through walls, right. And again, you can turn on different permissions based on what, what whoever's in the device, what they need to see, but that seems like a fairly obvious use case, but it may just be obvious to you and I, and not.

I think we're still kind of there though, because , um, imagine of them, of the completed building with all the mechanical, like everything in it, and it's the owner. If the owner can't run it, it's a limited value. Uh , the facility people have a different use case in that it's the same data, but it's a substance, again, getting down to the core data and being able to say, well, I don't need, in some cases you might not even need the 3d at all.

I just say, I just want a piece of data assets, but I want the assets in a location. I like the XYZ. I don't need all the other 3d around it because I see it . We own another use case. I might need to be able to drill all the way into the model to look at the actual down , to compare .

There's so many use cases that have to be defined by us, but we tend to hear a lot of noise in the industry with , uh , our, our view, each user's view of what they think that model to be used for in the life cycle . Yes, it's going to get there, but there's a lot of stuff in between that can happen. That's much easier to do. And then we'll get to the more advanced things.

Um, and we've been consulting with a lot of owners like this, and I've run into a lot of them as I've gone through their second cycle where they tried a lot of it's what's the flow , the whole model, and the now let's maintain ethnicity. We can't maintain the models. Now we have to go back. Um, so that balance is important.

That balance, I think, is going to come from us that understand the industry and also to be able to collaborate with others outside of our typical view of that model, that data come up with that use case, which goes back to do we need to have the data that is accessible to everybody, no matter what platform and application is.

And to be able to think in terms of, well, I don't see an app out there that does what I need to do, and I could build an app, you know, from the pieces that we have in , it's getting much, much easier to build out some of those years ago. So building apps and getting to the data and creating these solutions.

That's why I think that there's a lot of , that's why, when I'm sure there's many more apps than that , we really need to think about applications as being disposable or even plan for it in case they do go away. What happens is they do .

But I think, you know, when, when we'll start to see some real traction is when, you know, ensuring that , uh, you know, contractors and even subs are, you know, making the data available, truing up the data, if it triggers payments, because you can go , you know, you can have these smart contracts again, live on blockchain, use AI, you're, you're able to take point cloud data, compare it against , um, you know, them data and the models and, and, you know, get to those traunches where people

would get paid. People will definitely pay attention if it triggers payments and it comes from the owners. Yeah .

If you look at that contract and break it down, and if you could find out the provenance of who actually made this decision and who put this thing into the building, and who's responsible for him to win, all of that is incredibly valuable. And if we can think in terms of using those technologies to build that functionality, that value, because I think that's going to be where we have to head. We can't identify value unless we can tag it somehow.

And we have to have owners that understand that too, that are willing to change the way that they contract. And we also have to kind of disrupt the traditional contracting method because there's a lot of really cozy, comfortable ways that things are done right now and paid for which don't make any sense at all, which is going to be, there's going to be a lot of pushback on that. So it's really a cultural shift.

The contracting shift and the technology is , is it's just about there, I think, to do a lot of this, but the biggest shift right now is I'll , I'll let this other stuff,

Just like you said, in the beginning, you know, you have to keep an eye on other industries and not be myopic because it's really important to just see how the technology is evolving, you know, across industry and just business in general. It's I think that can really help inform how we, how we change things. And , um, again, try and get the life cycle down to less than 25 years.

So this leads leads me to my, to my final question, which I ask everyone, which is if you could, and I'm sure you think about this a lot. If you could project yourself, you know, 15, 20, 25 years to the future, and you could bring with you, you know, any object or service, just something that makes your life better makes you personally happy, what would it be and what would it do?

But if you really think about it as humans, we're really interacting with our environment, our environment is really, you know, the whole damage GIS and all of that around us and information's there, but we need that device and that ability to do that. And the funny I thought about this before this call, and I thought that would be the ideal scenario. Then I thought about it that , wait a second, a lot of the stuff's already here today.

We already have a lot of these technologies to do it, but it goes back to what I said earlier. We don't have the underlying infrastructure that the open data on access make your eyes and the platforms and the , uh, the , the , uh, fearlessness to be willing to share, and also to be able to , uh, declare when something has value and be able to make a living off of that. Um, so I think that's, what's missing, but that defended advice .

And so it's kind of a cultural and a device thing that needs to come together. And I think it's gonna happen. What less than 25 years. Hopefully not .

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