Towards DesignOps Design Development, Delivery and Operations for the AECO Industry

Abstract

The overwhelming success of companies build on top of cloud computing technologies has been driven by their ability to create systems for processing big data at scale and designing high-quality digital products as well as being agile and capable of handling constant changes in the market. This runs somewhat contrary to the AECO industry, which generates an abundance of multidisciplinary data and faces numerous design challenges but is not as prone to agile management. The entire methodology for designing and delivering projects has historically been oriented toward getting all requirements defined and specified in advance. In that context, "change" of the workflow in AECO is often seen as an exception. Not only this is far from the paradigm or principles of today's business technologies, but today's enterprises are characterized by an opposing set of values. Latest software engineering methodologies, like DevOps and its design incarnation -DesignOps were created solely to tackle those issues in the IT industry. This paper will present how those methodologies could be successfully implemented in the AECO industry and increase the efficiency of existing design pipelines. We demonstrate a prototype of a software platform, an entire automated ecosystem where design operations are made in the cloud by a collection of automatic or semi-automatic microservices and where data flows seamlessly between various disciplines. The system leverages the potential of distributed computing, performance-driven design, evolutionary optimization, big data, and modern web design.