BIM Lessons From An Autodesk Expert Elite with Gary Cowan

Andrea Ciaffi

Hi, Gary. Welcome to the Digital Construction podcast.

Gary Cowan

Hello Andrea, how are you?

Andrea Ciaffi

So today in this episode, we are joined by Gary Cohen. So I probably didn't pronounce his name properly, so we'll probably have an opportunity to talk about that later. But he's the head of digital construction, AK in Group and he's a member of.

Andrea Ciaffi

The Outdesk expert elite programme, Gary, has two decades of ends on beam experience. He also has a lot of experience in design for manufacturing and assembly. Also reality capture and Gary will share with us our manufacturing precision cutting technology and. First thinking are they shipping high quality MEP delivery Gary?

Andrea Ciaffi

How do you say your surname we were talking about this before the episode.

Gary Cowan

Yeah. I would say Gary Cowan and it's it's it's imagine it's the animal, the cow that you would milk. So say the word cow and then it's an and then just say it all in one word. It is a difficult surname.

Andrea Ciaffi

Beautiful.

Gary Cowan

A lot of people struggle with it. It's just I accept it now. Everywhere I go all over the world people have a different way of pronunciate and so. I just. It's all right. Call me whatever you want.

Andrea Ciaffi

Yeah. So, yeah, we were joking about this before starting recording the episode, because I'm from Italy and I live in Australia and Gary is in Belfast, in Ireland. So I, Gary, before we start, I I would like to start with an ice breaker and what is the best piece of advice you have ever received in your career?

Gary Cowan

It's a good question. I think I've had a long thing with this question. I really did. I've received so much advice over the years.

Gary Cowan

Obviously I've been doing it for 20 years, but if I really think deep about it, it goes all the way back to a piece of advice that my oldest brother Alan gave to me as a very young boy when I used to work for him.

Gary Cowan

He's a lot older than I am. He's 16 years old. Older than me, so I used to work as a joiner for him when I was a young lad 14/15/16 and the best piece of advice that he ever gave me is to measure twice and cut once.

Andrea Ciaffi

Hmm.

Gary Cowan

And that's it. Just measure twice. Cut once.

Andrea Ciaffi

Yeah.

Gary Cowan

Always double check everything you're doing. Always be sure of your decisions. Be sure before you commit because it's better to measure twice and cut once. Then measure three times and cut twice. You know what I mean?

Andrea Ciaffi

Yeah. Yeah.

Gary Cowan

So I apply that to everything that I do. It's precision. It's certainty. It's caution, it's, you know, best foot forward approach. Don't firefight Tran. You can see it in the BIM that I do. It's all pre measured. It's all pre thought. It's very precise.

Gary Cowan

It's it's it's. It's the way it has to be and it all comes back to that piece of advice that I got when I was 14 from my brother.

Andrea Ciaffi

Yeah, that's great. And talk about your career journey, so you worked in manufacturing and then construction. Yeah, can you walk us through your career path?

Gary Cowan

Yeah. Certainly as young boy, as I said before, I really started working properly. I was working for my older brother Alan who, who ran his own joinery company at the time and got a lot of on site experience and working in people's homes, fitting kitchens, fitting.

Gary Cowan

Wooden floors and doorways and art dribs and all that kind of stuff and just general construction and give me a sort of taste for construction. I really enjoyed working with my hands and building things, and then I was doing really well in school.

Gary Cowan

I was doing quite well academically, so I ended up going for an engineering degree in Queen's University in Belfast and. Back in those days, that was in the early 2000s there there was no BIM. BIM didn't exist. That didn't have any emit, didn't all of design was done through two-dimensional AutoCAD, through polylines and hand sketching.

Gary Cowan

So at that stage, when I graduated. From Queens with a degree in mechanical and manufacturing engineering, I had sort of a manufacturing tinge to my engineering. I was using solid edge and solid works. That was very early released at that stage in the early 2000s and it was component design that I was really doing in university.

Gary Cowan

I was part of the Queen's Formula Student racing team. I was the cockpit engineer where we had to design a single seat racing car using a motorcycle engine, so that was really good experience as well. I designed the cockpit, the seat and all the steering arrangements and then when I graduated I sort of went straight into the building services sector then.

Gary Cowan

Part of my degree has a sandwich year. I spent that year in a in a built in services firm designing MEP services basically. But that was old school back then. That was 2D CAD, it was just drawn Poly lines and you know, drawn the ductwork from scratch as it was back then.

Gary Cowan

And that was a real taster for me. And then when I graduated in 2006, then I just joined straight into the industry as a CAD technician, really on the 1st role. And then that company, I managed to accelerate quite quickly. I had an opportunity to do a bit of design in the company and show what it could do and wants to.

Gary Cowan

See that it was able to do all the calculations and size the pipes and says the Ducks, they give me a permanent contract, but almost quite quickly into that job, about six or seven months in all of this, the management, the site management stood up and walked away and left.

Gary Cowan

And I was one of the only mechanical minded people left in the team and. The senior contracts manager at time Stephen Boyce gave me an opportunity, said look, kid, if you want to go and learn how it's done, he knew I was very green behind the ears.

Gary Cowan

Very, very new day at all. He sent me out on sites in as a contracts manager, but I was literally 22 years old. And was learning from all this the the experienced guys on site.

Gary Cowan

So for a few years I kicked about sites doing shop fitting, doing a project management role sitting in the site meetings, talking about the stuff you know, sorting out all the materials, sorting out health and safety, doing the Rams. Arranging all the site labour, all that kind of stuff.

Gary Cowan

But then when I was going to the sites because I was travelling away from Belfast, it was all over Ireland and the UK when I was staying over to do the meetings, I was actually going on to the site stand and pounding on a set of overalls and I was asking the guys to teach me how do you hang pipe?

Gary Cowan

How do you thread pipe? How do you hanged up work so. The first few years my career I was I was I was doing all things I was learning on site was learning the trade. I was sitting in site meetings as a contracts manager.

Gary Cowan

I was doing health and safety. I was doing estimating. So all the way through my career I've really touched all corners of construction and had an experience of most parts of it and then.

Gary Cowan

And around about 2007, I was working in a huge hospital scheme here in Northern Ireland and it was running a team of about 60 plumbers on site and we're doing all the drainage and that was when I was introduced to rabbit and that's what the first project that I've ever seen in Rabbit and I was blew away at the technology.

Gary Cowan

And immediately I had to have it. So I went and sourced a copy and installed it on a computer at home and just started drawing everything. They get my hands on. I took photographs of my house and my mum and dad's house and my brother's houses and drew all of them just to teach myself how to actually use rabbit.

Gary Cowan

Having had a quite a number of years of experience in Canada was already very. In that mindset and that focus of how is this going to accelerate and just loved Rabbit just fell in love with it, just mastered it pretty quickly, been able to draw all disciplines structural steel because in those days there was very little companies or people producing them content.

Gary Cowan

So the very first job that really got doing them properly was with Cane group back in 2000. 2012 and I was their very first revenue technician in the door. They had won a project in London with boys.

Gary Cowan

It was called Paul Rd School and there was a BIM requirement that it was the first project they'd ever had, but that BIM requirement that was this mystical term and a contract that they had received, BIM, what has been, so they put it.

Gary Cowan

Job advert out and at that stage I had been using rabbit for about two years. At that stage, maybe three years. That's a good mental arithmetic here. I probably started in 07/08, so several years at that stage, but not full time job, always in the capacity of a contracts manager trying to build the building, never as a focused technician.

Gary Cowan

So King Group was the first time I thought, you know, leave the sites for a while, go back and sit in the office and do a bit of design work. So trying to get back to the design routes. I think at that stage.

Gary Cowan

Had decided to had enough sight. Really had enough of my family to agree, and I've had a number of children and five children there. So at that stage I just come back to do design and Kian had no infrastructure, no BIM, that literally just handed me.

Gary Cowan

Desktop PC and what used to be the building design suite package that was a little USB pen that had all of Revit and everything on, and they were like we have no idea what this is. We need you to to, to do something for us and 12 years later that Kane or one of the world's leading.

Gary Cowan

Digital construction experts in the world. So I'm asking tried it. The journey over the last 12 years and all of the technologies that we've mastered as a as a team.

Andrea Ciaffi

Yeah, that's incredible. And I always found it interesting to learn how different people end up working in this space coming from different angles. So yeah, very interesting. One of the things you are familiar with is manufacturing. And I just wonder. What are the principles from manufacturing that still influence how you approach construction today, if any?

Gary Cowan

Well, just one of the things that sort of caught my eye and made me think about it. Whenever I first came into the construction industry, I'm coming from a manufacturing discipline and background. We were working to very tight tolerances. We were taught in university about, you know, very, very fine tolerances.

Gary Cowan

And when you walk on the building side and. The drawings can be as much as 100 millimetres out or more. It just didn't make sense to me that the drawings were always such a rough indication the technology was evolving so quickly. Even back then 20 years ago, that it was quite clear to me then that there was a capability to absolutely simulate this building.

Gary Cowan

One to one. You know every single thing that you were going to install was capable of being modelled and at that stage in 2000 and even 2010, two 1011, that seemed quite out of reach because even then, the rendering technology that we had in the graphics cards and the computers, it was quite Spacey.

Gary Cowan

And even back then. I recently opened quite a lot of models just as an exercise to do a lot of media and it was quite stark how empty those models were compared to today. And back then we really were pushing the limits with the hardware and the capability.

Gary Cowan

So it's amazing to see how quickly it has changed, you know. It's been 20 years for me, but you know, it's been sort of almost a very slow start with them. It didn't took a long time to catch on, but this maybe for the last 5-6 years the the intensity of the the exponential curve worldwide is is is truly remarkable.

Andrea Ciaffi

Yeah, interesting. And we are talking about your experience and the fact that you have been accepted into the Autodesk Expert Elite programme. For those who are less familiar with this programme, could you share with us what this programme is and what it means to you?

Andrea Ciaffi

Yeah.

Gary Cowan

I was approached by other desk which is kind of an honour as well because normally it's quite a long lengthy process to apply for it. Normally you have to actually apply to to be an expert lead and you have to sort of show show your your excellence and show your your mettle.

Gary Cowan

As such you know you have to show. You have to have a vast wealth of experience behind you with all of their software products. You have to have knowledge of a number of software products with them. It was an oldest university that team approached me and said like we've sort of seen you online.

Gary Cowan

I've seen all the work you're doing. Keynes. I have a quite a strong relationship with a lot of different parts of Autodesk, a lot of different teams, because as part of my. Role in developing the systems. We didn't just go and buy the software and try and figure out how to use it.

Gary Cowan

That's not really my style, you know, I'll literally reach out to the developers and the teams that are actually making these technologies and introduce myself and straight up a conversation with them and look to say to them, look, you know. I'm not a generic user here.

Gary Cowan

I have a very specific use case for the the business that we do and the technologies that we need to use and a lot of the times the technologies just don't work out out-of-the-box for us and I might spend a few months trying to figure it out, but just run into so many roadblocks that the only solution is to reach out to the dev team.

Gary Cowan

You know when you're an elevator and you're trying to do things out-of-the-box, you can't live by the rules of rabbit. You can't live by the the guardrails that are put in place. I like to jump over them and look at it from every angle, so quite often I'll reach directly out to all the their team.

Gary Cowan

So I I know pretty much all the senior team at an Autodesk at the XR team. Gay paez. Nick fonta. Nick Lambert, there's so many people on that team, all of their marketing team. I'm in the the Autodesk Construction Cloud team now. I've had meetings a lot of the senior teams there as well.

Gary Cowan

So you know it's it's, it's how you approach them, you know? Do you just buy the product and install the computer and sit in the gate or do you disassemble it and do you reengineer it? And.

Gary Cowan

Reconstituted to work for you as a company, and that's the the level of dedication that we have as a team, certainly me as the as the leader and the expert elite has been a recognition of that and I'm manually proud to achieve that.

Gary Cowan

We are a team of experts and it gives me access to direct access to all of those experts across all of the different technologies. Desk and an individual forum that we can all keep in touch on. It's just for us.

Gary Cowan

It's like an exclusive club almost that we have, you know, my messaging board and forum boards and we even have actually a WhatsApp group that I can speak to all of the experts worldwide and for me that's key. It's amazing to be able to speak to the.

Gary Cowan

All their experts like me, you know, I don't want to be. I don't want to talk to salesman. Do you know what I mean? I'm. I'm a real world engineer that builds buildings. I'm not interested in sales pitches. I want to talk to people that are like me, that know what they're doing are experts in their field and are willing to share.

Gary Cowan

And that's exactly what the other disc expert link team are. They're amazing punch guys from all over the world. Men and women. Fantastic team of Guys have a great fun of them. I haven't met a lot of them personally yet because it was made it all just expert elite after the last time I was over at in America.

Gary Cowan

But I'm hoping that to be at Autodesk University this year, so I got to meet all the guys in person and have great fun there. Autodesk University is it's just a different experience, it really is.

Andrea Ciaffi

Yeah, this is great. And I think I hope this this story will

Gary Cowan

Yeah.

Andrea Ciaffi

encourage people to try to improve their knowledge, improve their skills in, in digital for construction and all of the others products because maybe other people can reach this. Encourage this position and can join this programme when they prove that they are at this level and.

Gary Cowan

Without a doubt. I mean, I'm just an I'm just a normal guy from Belfast and Northern Ireland. We're a very small part of the world.

Andrea Ciaffi

Yeah.

Gary Cowan

We're a very small people but seem to produce top quality talent, certainly in BIM. I would say, Ireland and Northern Ireland is one of the leading countries in the world doing digital construction develops. And I know a lot of different individuals in the country here.

Gary Cowan

The like minded people like themselves that are very, very, very good what they do.

Andrea Ciaffi

Yeah, that's great. And do you think that this community at the OUTDESK expertly programme are influence innovation or sharing any knowledge their own way?

Gary Cowan

Oh yes. Oh, some. Some of the biggest influencers on LinkedIn are are expert elites and staff. Ellen, shall we would be a good friend of mine. Who's he was the probably the previous appointed member before me. I met him at Elderdise University. He's from Egypt.

Gary Cowan

He's a he's one of the most knowledgeable people. You know in the industry if there's anything that man doesn't know about constructionist, it's not worth knowing. There's so many brilliant individuals in the list about, but I would do them all at the service.

Gary Cowan

Not that all name them individually. There's so many. So I would set them up on the phone here and bring them out. But there's so many top, top voices from LinkedIn.

Gary Cowan

And they're all expert elites as well, and it's such a great bunch of guys for sharing ideas and bouncing things off, and even talking about Autodesk and, you know, getting help with each other, being putting put in contact with different people you wouldn't normally know.

Gary Cowan

So it's. It's what you know and who you know as well. You know, if you have to be at that level, I think to be in that circle. So and as you said, it's not a special circle of people. All those people in that circle are just normal people just doing their job.

Andrea Ciaffi

Is it a? Is there like a public list of the names of these people, or is it something that? Yeah.

Gary Cowan

That I have that award in that achievement. But certainly, yeah,

Andrea Ciaffi

No.

Gary Cowan

you do get great already. It's very great company. I know a lot of people sort of crap on them, but I've had nothing but great experiences with everybody. I even got to beat Andrew Angulos, the CEO himself, about three or four months ago.

Gary Cowan

I had the enjoyment of an hour of his time, would you believe? On a call this with him and all of his senior vice presidents, doing like an incubation board talking about XR technology. The man was just asking me, you know, are we on the right track here with all this XR, all this money them spent?

Gary Cowan

I was like, Yep, you better believe it, Andrew. It's going to change how construction. Works, and we'll talk about that in the broadcast here. It's it's phenomenal technology.

Andrea Ciaffi

Yeah, that's exciting. And just changing here, I wanted to talk because you have experience in design for manufacturing and assembly and also known as dfma and it kind of has a different, potentially different mindset. If you think about designing for construction. But for those who are less familiar with the concept of dfma, can you explain the difference within this approach and the design for construction?

Gary Cowan

Yeah, certainly DFMA or design for manufacture and assembly as full terminology, but bit of an American thing, I think that's coming from the Americas. It's basically prefabrication here in Europe and UK. We would have termed it prefab or prefabrication. And essentially all it is is is trying to take as much of the actual construction from the site to a controlled factory environment.

Gary Cowan

So if you can imagine it's especially good for certain building elements are very good. So you, everyone knows sort of prefabricated bathroom pods that you would build the entire bathroom.

Gary Cowan

Inside the steel frame, you would tie all the inside of it, fit all your top spot sink and that is repackaged up and brought the site and set and set you and that is a portion of work that was pre manufactured, prefabricated and sets into place in the MEP world.

Gary Cowan

It lends itself perfectly for us. In certain industries, if we're doing an industrial job, for example, a lot of the heavy plant and machinery and all of the associated pipe work involves and sets needs to have a specific set out. And it's very time intensive to do that in situ on a site.

Gary Cowan

So we can design that on a huge steel frame and have that all. Configured and manufactured, assembled, tested, configured, signed off in QA sheets and brought to site and just sat in the place. So it's almost like bringing big Lego pieces to set to the site.

Gary Cowan

You know the site becomes an assembly yard rather than a construction site, so you're trying to do as much off the site. And then just bring everything to the site and put it all together really quickly and that can be all of the building elements.

Gary Cowan

It's not just the MEP, it can be precast concrete, it can be, you know, wall facades and sections that can be, you know, it can be many, many parts of a building, can be broken down into subsequent little pieces and. Designed off site with a high intensity high LOD mindset so that when it comes to site, it's almost like a machine being put together.

Gary Cowan

We're working to very, very tight tolerances, so the old attitude and the old building system of just. Produce a set of drones. Everyone descends on the site and it's an absolute mad scramble to try and get all the services in and people are fighting and cutting each other.

Gary Cowan

Services. That was the way. That's where I that was the state of the built in services industry. Whenever I started 22 years ago. It used to be the attitude was first in first up and that was the argument.

Gary Cowan

If your stuff was up, it couldn't be touched and it created stupid construction that created workarounds and it was just not efficient and my attitude from a manufacturing background is let's just build it like a machine.

Gary Cowan

Like it's a forward rolling through a factory, but the factory is the building and each piece comes and it's pre signed off and it's pre tested and it's pre insulated and it's ready to go and it means that we can attack very, very aggressive time scales on site now.

Gary Cowan

So instead of bringing all the raw materials to site. And stick building as it's known as and putting it all together piece by piece is the old old school of method of building and we don't do it that way anymore. Now modern technology, modern construction is slick, it's fast, it's pre thought.

Gary Cowan

It's efficient. That, and that's exactly the system that we've come up with with this dfma workflow.

Andrea Ciaffi

Yeah, this is this is a very interesting approach to to construction and I know you're also passionate about maintaining extremely high LOD models. Sometime you say insane,

Gary Cowan

Yes.

Andrea Ciaffi

insanely high level LOD models.

Gary Cowan

Yes. Yeah.

Andrea Ciaffi

Why is that so important for you?

Gary Cowan

Because from my own experience of starting in this industry and the the old drawings were always just a rough estimate. You know, you should roughly put your paperwork on the side. You should roughly under ductwork on that side, and sometimes it worked.

Gary Cowan

Vast majority of times it did not work and the amount of rework that they had done on AutoCAD drawings that you had to basically scrub them and go and survey the site. So all I've seen was wasted effort, wasted effort wasted, time wasted, money wasted, resource wasted, human experience.

Gary Cowan

You know what I mean? Must be a better way to do it so. Whenever I started thinking about construction in a in a pre manufacture pre fab sense, it made total sense of it's going to solve all those problems. It's going to make you know installation fast and simple and it's much easier to assemble.

Gary Cowan

Pipework and ductwork in rigs in a factory environment. You can control the temperature you control. You know the much more comfortable for the humans that we have doing the job for us, that's very, very important to us as a company culture as well.

Gary Cowan

Our people is one of the most important things you know, we love what we do, but. People are above the work in in the triangle of importance. In Kane, we deeply, deeply care of other people. So if we can make the work easier for all of our people and all of our staff across the board, that's another benefit to everyone.

Gary Cowan

So if we can bring huge sections of work into the factory. Where we control the quality, we control the environment and we can control the speed and the pace and how we produce these things. It's almost a lot of traditional construction was linear, you know, things had to happen for things to happen, but it's more of a parallel approach that once something happens, five things can happen.

Gary Cowan

10 things can happen because they're common pre manufactured pre configured, so it's a. It's a huge uplifting speed and accuracy and it's only you're only able to do it with a DFMA workflow. And it's not just rabbit that does that. You can't just be a DFMA person just because you can produce a rabbit model.

Gary Cowan

It's all of the surrounding. And workflows and technologies and people. So we have a fabrication warehouse facility. So we're producing drawings for that environment. So we're producing drawings for manufacture at home and we're also producing drawings and content that is delivered to our design partners and clients for the actual construction process.

Gary Cowan

So I actually managed to I manage all the construction sites and and there's an off site team that I work closely with but they manage all of the manufacturing stuff and it's a very complex system. So you can't just say oh, we do rabbit.

Gary Cowan

So we do digital construction, no, a lot of people do. Do them, but they don't do digital construction. You know, that's what.

Gary Cowan

That's what the term VDC is virtual design construction, which is probably the next topic that we're going to talk about is, you know, what do you do with the model when you have the model, how do you actually use that to construct the building if all you do is print two-dimensional drawings and send them to your site, but you're not using digital construction?

Gary Cowan

And properly on site you know your team should have access to the 3D model.

Gary Cowan

They should have access to XR technologies to be able to stand on site with a tablet and compare the model in Sichi or go to one of our remote offices and put a VR headset on and walk around the completed articles so that they can understand the scope of the work and what has went.

Gary Cowan

Goals were and then when they go back to site, they've already seen it.

Gary Cowan

They understand it, they've seen it in their minds act, you know, you support your your installation team with this software and that's kind of been my role for the last four or five years as head of digital construction is to branch out into the rest of the company now and get everyone in that mindset of using the digital model as the.

Gary Cowan

The source of truth and all of our team, from the accountants to the QSS to the procurement guys, manufacturing people, installers on site design, management directors, everyone looks at the BIM model, not just the design team, everyone and all of the decisions are made using the model and all of the.

Gary Cowan

Everything, all of this data is recorded in the model.

Andrea Ciaffi

Yeah. One of the things that I like about this podcast podcast is to push you to speak with people of different parts of the world, like. And I think when people, you know, started the same part of the world where I live now, think about the things you just said that could be very inspiring because construction.

Andrea Ciaffi

Is managed probably differently in this part of the world. So yeah, it's very exciting to speak with you. The different approach and speaking about that, you talk about these models with lots of details. And I think one of the objections or comments that people from Australia may have is.

Andrea Ciaffi

You balance models details with efficiency and performance, because now you're adding a lot of details. How do you manage that?

Gary Cowan

It's difficult because we fabricate directly from the model, so everything that we design and we we put that insane amount of LOD in because all of the manufacturing drones that are sent to the factory are derived directly from the rabbit model. There's no duplication in the AutoCAD, so we don't design something in 3D and then say, right.

Gary Cowan

Detail that frame and all those pipe works in AutoCAD. It's those elements that exist in the model are what's are placed on sheets and details. So you have to have that level of detail in the model to be able to tag it and measure it and do all that.

Gary Cowan

And when you're producing fabrication trade great drawings, it has to be to LOD 4. 404 fifty absolute minimum for you to be able to do that and what happens is that we have models that are highly detailed really only in the areas that we have to pre manufacture.

Gary Cowan

If you think about it, you know, so if there's plant spaces or risers or corridor voids. And our models, they will be shocked, full of stuff, you know, and then all of the rooms will have all of the stuff in them, so they'll be late switches and sockets and switches in the walls.

Gary Cowan

But all of that has the internal stuff inside the wall. So the back box, the internal conduit within the wall, we Add all of that to give us the capability of doing digital take offs now as well, which is. A new thing that has exploded from that it used to be just for detail, just for drawn just for construction.

Gary Cowan

And then there was the penny drop moment of hold on a minute. I can schedule all of this. I can quantify all of this and it's live. So as we add to the model or subtract from the model. Our digital BOM is keeping tally and keeping track, so it was phenomenal at that stage.

Gary Cowan

Some of the realisations, some of the stuff came naturally just as a progression of the different technologies, such as the the digital take off. So the the quest of high LOD. As it's a double edged sword, of course you are right.

Gary Cowan

Some people's systems don't take it, but you know the technology is moving so quickly at the moment the the, the the weakest point is Revit and all of this, it's Revit itself is hard to drive when it's so highly detailed.

Gary Cowan

But once you release that geometry and data into third party engines, and you're looking at it through different cdes like order disc construction, cloud, or some of the other tools like Daleks or Rivisdo, perhaps there is no. There is no hardware limit. There is no problem.

Gary Cowan

You know we have through the biggest and most aggressive. Of models we have all of these different technologies and there is no limit. So maybe when I started rabbit 20 years ago that was a real concern, that it was computers used to really, really struggle with 3D models.

Gary Cowan

But that is just so it's so slowly disappearing now. And people don't even understand, so people might only be using Revit for three years and be quite frustrated at how slow it is. You've no idea he didn't use it back in 2008 when it was Revit 1.0, and it was very, very limited.

Gary Cowan

I am not convinced I hear that argument all the time. I see it online. People write to me on LinkedIn all the time. That's nonsense. And all your computer's going to explode. And I'm like, well, sorry, we're doing this work every day. We're using these technologies every day.

Gary Cowan

No one's stopping. We're working at Lightnings. Pace, so I don't. Your comment doesn't hold water in this company. It doesn't exist. We are full wealth and. I'm very proud of the fact that the company are so supportive of all these things. They understand the importance of it and and they're willing to invest.

Gary Cowan

So all of our technicians have the very latest computers, very latest technologies. We're all running very good graphic cards in our computers and everyone has a Quest 3 headset for VR. You know, there's no expense spurred and it shows.

Gary Cowan

Because the team work at lightning speed, the work with the team can produce is that I'm incredibly proud of the work that all of our guys and guys produce as a team between our design, people are been people and in the wider, you know, the men and women on the ground that actually build the buildings.

Gary Cowan

You know, we do it twice. We build the building digitally and we make a beautiful digital version and then we assist the site team to create it in real life.

Andrea Ciaffi

That's great. And sometimes you also have to deal with the existing conditions. So I would like to talk about reality capture and point cloud. So what type of problems does reality capture solve solves for you that probably traditional service can't? Um, and how do you integrate point Cloud data into your beam workflows?

Gary Cowan

Well, Kane group are an Irish firm. We're based in in Ireland, the Northern Ireland, here in a town called Banbridge. But the the primary focus for our company for the last sort of 15 years has been the London worked. So all of our work is in London.

Gary Cowan

So the first factor, the primary factor is that I can't go to site very easily. I have to get on an aeroplane. And fly over. And it's a hotel, so it's huge cost and expense for anyone to go and actually lay eyes on the site.

Gary Cowan

So point Cloud survey allows us to go in and take a digital map of a building, whether it's brand new or it's existent. Certainly we've been certain to do a lot of retrofit office spaces in London where.

Gary Cowan

The building has been stripped back to its structure and then we go in with the the point cloud scanning technology and we map the entire inside and outside of the building and that allows us to create a a digital twin. That's not a pretty digital twin, but it's a digital representation.

Gary Cowan

Of the building that is insanely accurate, you can literally read writing on the walls. You can see cracks in the concrete. It's insanely high detail and that can be brought directly into the rabbit environment so you have a digital snapshot of the building as it stands in reality in your rabbit session so you can hit all the spaces.

Gary Cowan

And the structure you can head openings, you can inspect, you can measure and you don't have to be on site. You know you're you're doing it from the luxury of your office chair and then that technology allows you to keep your model current.

Gary Cowan

So we we use our reality capture technology for a number of different use cases, so.

Gary Cowan

Initially, when we enter a space and if we're doing high precision pre manufacture for an area, we will send the digital team in first and they will scan the entire room at a very high level of detail and then that is brought back into the model and compared to the Revit model and then if it doesn't line up then the Revit model structure is out over the shoulder.

Gary Cowan

And we use the actual scan as the backdrop as the background so that we know that when we pre manufacture all this stuff, when we bring it to site and we offer it to the area, it's been offered to the same to the same geometries, the same shape to millimetre accuracy.

Gary Cowan

You know, I think if you use some of the higher grade. Scanners at the RTC 360 if you're in a room, that's no more than five metres across each way. It's sub sub millimetre pixel density. It's it's finer than a human hair and you see everything.

Gary Cowan

Do you know what I mean? So any of your plumbers are having a sleep in the corner? He's caught out. He's going to be on camera. He's going to be on scan. This was life. It's very, very cool technology. We use it for as built workflow.

Gary Cowan

So as we install services we scan them and then just use that as a feedback loop back into the model to make sure that everything's going as it should be and. If there's any show stoppers or there's anything found that is untoward, say there's an extra steel member has been brought in.

Gary Cowan

This the punt cloud lets us get that information into the model very, very quickly. If you were trying to stand in hand survey something for for example. It could take you an R to stand and make measurements and perhaps get one of them wrong.

Gary Cowan

The like RTC or the BLK 360G2, which we use which is the re small one. You can set that up the tripod within a minute and it takes 30 seconds for a scan. And then you walk away and the data uploads in the cloud and then it's with my data guy sahas within 15 minutes and it takes him an hour to process the point cloud.

Gary Cowan

And then within two hours, my Revit team have the answer in their session ready to go. Whereas traditionally you might have had to wait a day for the survey, maybe a day or two for the surveyor to send you the e-mail a day to sit and read the e-mail and try to understand it.

Gary Cowan

Maybe a day to try and model the beam in because you're working off a 2D drone, whereas it takes me 30 seconds to load a point cloud in and go. There's the answer right there. Fix it so it's an exponential increase of accuracy, certainty and speed for construction.

Gary Cowan

Certainly it's a very key technology in construction now.

Andrea Ciaffi

Yeah, it's very exciting. And another piece of technology you mentioned before, virtual reality and augmented reality, how do you think they are changing coordination and decision making at the moment? And where do you see that they are the most valued today?

Gary Cowan

Well, I've been an XR aficionado. Whatever you want to call it a a a promotion. Been been promoting the XR. Certainly in construction myself for almost a decade now. I first discovered VR through my own passion of gaming. I'm a gamer. I love to play games of play, Xbox play, PlayStation and back in 2016 when they announced the Oculus Rift, I was blown away.

Gary Cowan

I, being a child of the 1980s, I love VR. It's very nostalgic for me. It's retro. I thought it was such a cool technology and.

Gary Cowan

When my Oculus Rift came in 2016 and and I started playing games, one of the first games I played, I think I was in a in a warehouse setting and and I was looking around in VR and I could see all of this ductwork and pipework that the artists had rendered.

Gary Cowan

And the penny just dropped with me. And I was like, hold on a minute. I do this every day. I was. I was in 2016. I was working in King Group and I was doing BIM. And I was doing BIM during the day.

Gary Cowan

And then I was doing VR gaming at night with my friends. And the penny just dropped. And I was like. Holy crap, you can. You can do this. I could use this to review my work, so I started looking out into the industry to see, you know, who's doing this?

Gary Cowan

What way does it work? And there was a few very mediocre offerings at the time. I think Autodesk had their own version out, which was. The engine they were using was called Stingray, and it was Revit Live was the product that they released for about 6 to 8 months and then quietly withdraw again because it was pretty pathetic to be honest.

Gary Cowan

But then I came across this software package called RSVR. Called Prospect RSVR with the company and it was phenomenal at the time. It was brilliant and I I watched a few videos on their YouTube and and downloaded a demonstration copy and tried to load in one of our key models and the whole system crashed just wouldn't, wouldn't even load the model at all.

Gary Cowan

So. Literally, as me being me, and that's not enough for me. So I just left at the phone. They had a phone number for their office in New York, and I just left at the phone and was like, I need to speak to somebody on the deaf team, please.

Gary Cowan

And like, hello, who's this guy? Hello. Some Irish guy on the phone here, wanting to speak to the devs. I got speaking to somebody and it was Jordan and explained to him who I was and what I was trying to achieve and he was like, yeah, yeah, you know, we'll have a look at that.

Gary Cowan

So that opened the engagement with those guys and very quickly, we entered into an NDA with them. And I said, great, well, I'll send you all of our data that we're struggling with, you know.

Gary Cowan

So I'll send you the models that won't load and see what you can do and that turned into basically an agreement between the two companies that they were like we've never seen a BIM like the BIM models that we're trying to write this software with are basic compared to what you're doing in the industry.

Gary Cowan

So like. We've been wasting our time. Like what have we been doing? Like we've been looking at these simple little models and then Gary walks in and drops this absolute beefcake on the table. What the hell are we doing, guys? So that focus them as a people to say no. Look, that's what we should be working towards.

Gary Cowan

And it was a really good we had a real good synergy between US and I got really close to a lot of the guys. And then. And we became one of the first customers for Prospect and we trialled it, we got it working and there was a lot of limitations at time.

Gary Cowan

Colorization was a problem. Everything that we exported from our model because we use fabrication services comes with the fabrication grey, the Autodesk Grey, I call it #7. Colour palette #7 if anyone all the cat technicians out there, I'll go. What you're talking about.

Gary Cowan

So it was very hard. You usually are when you're standing in a room and there's so much pipework and ductwork and cable tray and it's all the same colour grey. You can't use it. The system didn't work. I was like. It's so close.

Gary Cowan

You know, it's so close and then we managed to find a way around it by going through novice works.

Gary Cowan

So if you took your Rev model in the novice works that give you ability to colourize all of your services and then you were able to export from novice works into the the prospect as it was and it was game changing and we were doing a project along that time.

Gary Cowan

It was just like the stars and moons aligned the Claridges Hotel project, which was our huge project. We did in the Claridges Hotel, which was basically a completely pre manufactured job. Every single score into that job had to be pre manufactured and sent in packaged up.

Gary Cowan

And it was so complex. There's 13 kilometres of paper of 10 inch diameter steel. It was so complex, so huge. The only way that we could actually digest it and review it was in virtual reality, to be able to stand within it and review it digitally.

Gary Cowan

So that was the birth of virtual reality design review for us in 2017. I believe that was. And and that was phenomenal time. But it was quite cumbersome, to be honest. You had to have a very high grade PC. You had to have a sandy graphics card as well, and you were tethered to the PC with a with a wire to the Oculus Rift.

Gary Cowan

So it wasn't easy to get the the models to the system either. Required quite a bit of work in the workflow of export and navisworks. Colourizing it and then uploading it to their cloud services and their cloud because they were such a small team, their servers were rubbish at the time, so it used to take like 5 hours to upload to their server.

Gary Cowan

And there was a limitation in the hardware that we can only ever look at one floor of a building at once. It just crushed the the engine. If you tried to do more than one floor because there was so much in our model, they just couldn't handle it.

Gary Cowan

So. It worked for a number of years. It was a it was a steady usage for us. We implemented it in all of our projects and it became a staple of our business and our offering to our clients that we owe that extra mile.

Gary Cowan

And we think things out and and we really. You know, design it to the NTH degree, even using virtual at a time, but then sort of during a couple of years and then Iris was then bought first by the wild. It was a another competing company that was run by my good friend Gabe Pez.

Gary Cowan

And then actually very quickly after he bought Iris autos desk. Stepped in and bought all of it, and then that whole team that was a mixture of the the prospect guys and the wild guys all came together and then they became the Autodesk XR team.

Gary Cowan

So I know pretty much the entire Autodesk XR team now from working with them for almost a decade and they're the best bunch of guys. I love them all. They're a great bunch of people. And the really welcomed me and almost like a an honorary Autodesk member.

Gary Cowan

And that's why I've got my Autodesk expert elite and and where I am and the position I'm today. Because, you know, I owe a lot to those guys and that team. So the the product, the the next generation product that they started to develop that brought me in very quickly and they said great guy.

Gary Cowan

Now we're going to design the next generation VR experience and we're going to make it absolutely fully in paced in the ACC, Autodesk Construction Cloud ecosystem. So instead of being in a separate third party product, we're going to build this as part of our Autodesk ecosystem.

Gary Cowan

And I was delighted. I was like this is. Absolute music to my ears. So we started working together again, signed an NDA, got into work, we started providing them all of our latest models again and very quickly they started to produce what is now Autodesk Workshop XR and I've been very proud to be a beta tester on that day.

Gary Cowan

One absolute day one, Autodesk got a tester and. I've had the ability to mould that product slightly and make sure that it works for not only else is keen, but honestly for anyone in the industry of any company you know, I know what needs to be a not for for an engineer or an architect or a sybils guy.

Gary Cowan

I know what needs there for the the common engineer or architect. At the table rather than a manager, you know these guys make the software, but they don't use the software. They need someone like me that uses it to tell them if they're on the right track and the work that those guys have done on that engine is phenomenal.

Gary Cowan

So we've now went from being tethered to a high, high, big computer to. All were in the the very latest Quest 3 headsets and and it's all cloud based and it's directly linked into your ACC project. So all of our Rev technicians are working directly live on ACC.

Gary Cowan

They publish the model within 30 minutes. I can put my. Headset on and go directly in the model in ACC and I can review my model and instead of being in a third party app that you could do very little in. It's in the ACC ecosystem.

Gary Cowan

It's in the ACC structure. I can create issues and assign them to people.

Gary Cowan

So I can sit in my office and what digitally say what a model and find all the problems and click issues everywhere and then slip my headset off and walk to my room technician in the other city office and all of the issues that I've just raised are present in his model and he knows exactly what he needs to do.

Gary Cowan

But the whole thing is he doesn't work in that workflow. He has a headset on as well. He walk it together and he sees the problems and he sees it in his modelling because he's seen it with his eyes and it's like he's standing on site and he's looking at it.

Gary Cowan

He really understands very, very quickly what he has to do to fix the problem. And he's off and he's away and he's excited because it's exciting technology. He's got to look at the stuff in VR. It's cool as F. And he's he's pumped up and he's ready to go.

Gary Cowan

So that's that's my style, you know that use technology to make it better. So that's virtual reality of the XR platform. XR means extended reality. So VR is at one end of the spectrum. Excuse me. And AR is the other end where it's augmented reality.

Gary Cowan

So finally the young ones out there remember Pokémon Go about 10 years ago, there was a craze, everyone running around trying to catch pokemons everywhere using their their iPhones. That's augmented reality. It layers a digital models into a video stream from a device.

Gary Cowan

So with her again we went out into the industry and we looked at all the solutions that right there and there was a number of AR solutions out there and I ended up meeting the team from Gamma, AR and those guys are absolutely phenomenal as well.

Gary Cowan

There's Jan and a couple of other guys are. Absolutely brilliant. They really know their stuff. And again, they're all engineers, architects, technical people who have stepped into the technology space because they've seen a gap. They've seen a a need and and they're actually people like me that are building it.

Gary Cowan

So I've much respect and love them guys. They're absolutely formal. And their technology again, is fully integrated into ACC. So our guys on site can just load up gamma because it's working on the same published Federated model as soon as they open the the the tablet into the software.

Gary Cowan

The model is synchronised and it's live and then they can download the section of building that they want to look at in the site office and the site hub. And then walk on the site and we have calibration stickers everywhere and you just walk over, look at the calibration sticker with the QR code, and that calibrates you.

Gary Cowan

And then when you turn around and you look with your tablet, all of the BIM model is there. And as you move, it moves in the same respect and it keeps the same synchronous lock. And you can inspect. Elements you can measure from digital to real world.

Gary Cowan

You can see exactly and you can add an instant. See are you on the right track? Is your stuff in the right place? How much have you installed? Is there anything missing? Fingertip touch instantly not going through your CDE looking for the latest version of the drawing?

Gary Cowan

Having to ring the bin team? Have you uploaded the latest? Model it is the latest live information at your fingertips instantly, and if you the issue system is bidirectional across both platforms. So if I am in XR and I'm looking, I'm standing in VR looking at something in the model and I create an issue.

Gary Cowan

That I want someone on site to give me the real picture of. I can then take my headset off, go on the teams and say hello. Edward, please go on the site with your AR tablet and go and look at issue #67 that I've just made and he can walk on the site.

Gary Cowan

This tablet synchronise. The issue will appear all of the virtual photographs. From my view and the VR will appear on this tablet and he can see what I was looking at and he can take photos of the same perspective in the real world.

Gary Cowan

Synchronise that and I can see that on any platform on my laptop, on my desktop I can slip my VR headset on and see those real world images that were took with the AR system. Attached to the same issue. So my XR platform is completely spy directional across all stages of the build from design right through to construction, and that's what XR indeed.

Andrea Ciaffi

Yeah, yeah, that's great, Gary. And I can see you have learned a lot, a lot. You are a clearly an early adopter adopter of digital solutions and you have learned a lot from the past. And I would like to talk about the future.

Andrea Ciaffi

What are the which emerging technologies excite you the most right now?

Gary Cowan

I have to jump on the bandwagon and be like everyone and say it has to be AI.

Andrea Ciaffi

Yeah.

Gary Cowan

If what else is anyone talking about this last two years? AI for me is is a double edged sword. Anyone who watches me on LinkedIn sees how critical I am of of AI and.

Gary Cowan

People who use AI have no time for for what we call bluffers here in the UK, people who are two years in the industry and are literally just sitting asking Gee, ChatGPT questions and then pontificate on LinkedIn like they're actually offering this knowledge from themselves, from their own learned experience.

Gary Cowan

They're not, because when you start to drill down into them and you start to ask them questions about it or you show them that there's spelling mistakes or there's wild inaccuracies, no, not based on any standards, they start actually replying to you using the AI.

Gary Cowan

They're actually pasting my comments into the AI and asking the AI to give me answers. It's the same tone, same. Static structure long M dashes. It's actually real in the platform and it's actually having a massive negative effect negative effect on the younger engineers that are scrolling through universities and entering the industry at the moment.

Gary Cowan

And it's a huge crisis that no one's. Actually, talking about or willing to recognise the fact that AI is actually now seeing its own misinformation posts on socials and promoting it like it's real. So it's like a a continuing it gets worse every cycle because when the AI when someone asks the AI question about digital construction.

Gary Cowan

The AI doesn't know to go and look at standards. The standards are all locked behind paywalls. The AI has no access to the actual standards unless they're they're using nefarious paradise means. But they don't, because a lot of the stuff that you ask AI to return you back, it's not based on standards it's based on.

Gary Cowan

The social media repetition and nonsense over and over and over again. It keeps giving back ghost answers that are wrong and all the experts on LinkedIn and self included are starting to get really frustrated with the platform. I see a lot of experts walking away from it and leaving it, which is the biggest shame.

Gary Cowan

Because we're dealing our young people at the service by not giving them the reality. You have to stop it and you have to draw a line and say guys, no, stop putting up all these stupid AI posts that are AI generated. People showing AI generated images about digital construction technology.

Gary Cowan

With an AI generated post and my opinion is if you aren't actually using this technology, if you're not actually doing this in real life, you have no business talking about it and trying to teach people it on LinkedIn because you're not teaching anybody anything but illusion misinformation, noise in the machine, it's not real.

Gary Cowan

Grind ourselves. We all have to go out and touch grass. We all have to wait and feel the real world. This AI is starting to creep into all industries and it's going to cut the legs into some industries. It's going to ruin some industries and certainly for my industry.

Gary Cowan

I think it is causing a huge issue. As I said, it is a double edged sword. I think the benefit of the technology. Is going to be overwhelming. People will never look for an e-mail anymore. You will never read the document anymore. You will just ask an AI question about something and it will give you the answer.

Gary Cowan

And lazy people that will work to their detriment because they won't do the hard work that you need to develop as a human being in society. They'll just look for the easy access. The answer, and they won't grow and learn as humans, but the people who haven't built into them like me, who are looking to learn and looking to succeed.

Gary Cowan

I will. I will go from here to here within a year and people won't be able to catch me because I'll be using AI properly. But I have. The the actual technical knowledge behind it to understand when the AI is telling me lies, you're fresh at university and you're asking a question with digital instruction.

Gary Cowan

You have no idea if that AI is telling me the truth, whereas if I ask it the same question I know. And that's because I've had 20 years of being at the coalface and and doing it for real and the. And what can't lose sight of that in this digital AI era, AI can only ever be a tool to get better, not a tool to replace.

Gary Cowan

Not a tool to cut corners. There are no cutting corners in success. If you want to get the job done. Yeah. Cut corners all day. See if you want to be successful and you want to be recognised and you want to be known for being good at what you do.

Gary Cowan

There are no cutting corners.

Andrea Ciaffi

That's great. Like I I can see you really care about the next generation and we are close to the end. This is like my last question. What advice would you give to the next generation of digital construction leaders?

Gary Cowan

Probably what I said about AI don't don't, don't rush to the hype, you know, be sure in yourself. I was always very sure in what I knew and what I understood. I was. Some people are very easily LED. You know, a lot of people waste time.

Gary Cowan

Rope going down rabbit holes and looking at things because they're just, they're easily led by the nose. Always be very sure of yourself before you're sure of anyone else. If you're not sure of yourself, you can't be sure of anyone else around you.

Gary Cowan

So have confidence in yourself. Don't be afraid of failure. A lot. A lot of people starting their careers are really scared of feeling. They're really scared of being seen, as, you know, I think that's another thing with these generation because the Felix, the show behind the Philip renewed industry, they have to almost bluster and show off and say, look, I know all this stuff.

Gary Cowan

Don't be scared as been in the room of experts and saying, look, guys, I don't really know what I'm doing here. You'll be much more respected than walking into the swagger, acting like you know everything. Throwing something out, making a damn feel yourself, and you know, failure.

Gary Cowan

I'd call failure, failure. I call it a lesson I have had so many life failures and and life lessons all my life and. You can you can feel sad about them and you can feel down about them or you can think that was a lesson.

Gary Cowan

That was a lesson I had to learn of that experience. And you can play out the engineering. You can play construction, you can just apply to your life as as me getting older and growing older and just turn into a grumpy old man.

Gary Cowan

I found that, you know. You just have to try your best and and do good, and that's all you can do and believe in yourself. So that's what I think about the east of today. Don't don't try and bluff your way to success.

Gary Cowan

Don't you know? Walk the path. Don't be scared of the path. Walk the path and don't be scared of failing. Everyone's human. Everyone makes mistakes. It makes you a better person.

Andrea Ciaffi

Yeah. Really inspiring. Thank thank you, Gary. We are at the end of the episode if people want to reach out to you, where can they find you?

Gary Cowan

LinkedIn. I'm always very busy on LinkedIn. You can always get me on LinkedIn, on socials, I talk to people from all over the world all the time. I never stop on LinkedIn. They offer advice and education to people that teach people stuff. I send it on the Dynamo scripts for free that I that I. They do.

Gary Cowan

You know, I'm big for Sharon, Sharon, knowledge sharing experience. I love to speak to people from all over the world area. I'm talking to an Italian in Australia. It's phenomenal. It's brilliant.

Andrea Ciaffi

It is phenomenal indeed. Thank you very much, Gary. Like, I can see your passion. I really enjoy this episode with you. And thank you for joining us on the Digital construction podcast.

Gary Cowan

Thank you so much, Andrea. It's been a real pleasure. I hope we're going to do it again sometime.