Gareth McGlynn [00:00:04] Welcome back to the preconstruction podcast. We are slowly but surely reopening here in New York City. Although I do believe it will be baby steps compared to other states. But if that’s what it takes. The mere thing is people’s health and they stay healthy. To get us through this, I had the pleasure of speaking with Pettinger, who I have to say was a real sport for getting up at nine a.m. on a Saturday local California time to record this podcast.
Gareth McGlynn [00:00:35] I love her dedication to the preconstruction cause.
Gareth McGlynn [00:00:39] So who is this Noni Pettinger. I hear you ask newly started out in on the slopes of Seattle.
Gareth McGlynn [00:00:45] Then became a student of architecture before specializing in digital fabrication within robotics.
Gareth McGlynn [00:00:54] Newly discusses her journey through architecture digital fabrication. She talks about the future of digital fabrication in architecture from a general contractor and subcontract her point of view and her drive to narrow the tolerance and accuracy of digital robotics. This one almost got away from me from a technical point of view, but one I enjoyed, and I think you will, too.
Gareth McGlynn [00:01:19] Before we speak with Noni, let’s hear a few words from the main sponsor of the preconstruction podcast that’s back technology. So here is their president, Sturckow.
Stuart Carol [00:01:38] Hey, everyone. I’m Stuart Carol. The president of Beck Technology. We are based in Dallas, Texas, and we are a preconstruction software company. We were founded in 1996. And we’ve really been focused on the world of preconstruction. We believe that preconstruction is where the biggest decisions that impact the outcome of a project occur. And we believe that through the use of technology, we can enable all users to make better, more informed preconstruction decisions. The net result of which is to make the world a better place. We’re excited to announce our partnership with NEACH. And one of the things that really excites me is bringing preconstruction professionals the opportunity to get certified in our latest product, Destiny Estimates. It’s our belief that if we can help you understand how integrated preconstruction and preconstruction data lifecycle can benefit your business, it will ultimately improve the preconstruction services that you bring to your customers. And we’d like to announce that we’re gonna be releasing this at the end of Q1 and it’s available to anybody that’s a friend of Mitch.
Gareth McGlynn [00:02:58] Right.
Gareth McGlynn [00:03:00] Hey, Noni Pettinger, it’s Garreth, we’re going to hear from the preconstruction podcast. Welcome on board.
Noni Pettinger [00:03:05] Hi, Gareth. Thanks for having me.
Gareth McGlynn [00:03:07] Yeah. Thank you very much. And thanks for being so flexible. It’s time, 10:00 a.m. PST, in L.A., 9:00 AM, 9:00 a.m.. Wow. Thanks for thanks for making yourself available. So, yeah, I just wanted to quickly bring you back Noni. Well, first of all, before we go back to 2006, give us a quick overview of what you’re doing. No. Without getting too technical, just the people that don’t know you get an understanding of what you do.
Noni Pettinger [00:03:34] I work in technical project coordination for digital tools that approach the physical world and construction and design exiled.
Gareth McGlynn [00:03:44] And now we’re going to jump back to 2006. Environmental plumbing. Talk me through. Maybe the time before that. Were you always destined for this world or what was the plants?
Noni Pettinger [00:03:58] I think it’s been a bit of a bit of a journey to get here. But basically, I grew up in Seattle area and was kind of in a bubble within a bubble in the 90s and early on. So I went to university at Western Washington University of North and Environmental Studies and policy was kind of like a middle ground study area of study for people from the Northwest, like just a very progressive, like environmentally focused world. At that time. So also my priorities in undergraduate Dhanraj Together year were skiing and being on the ocean and nice riding by. So that was a great environment for both things like a mirror program and then a lot of back to the outdoors. So but I really loved environmental policy and planning because it was it was technical in terms of policy and it was international. So you kind of see how different companies virtues or values started to orchestrate like what their long term planning for the environment was. And then I really liked getting into more of that kind of capital economics of that like privatization of policy work versus public and nonprofit work. And from there.
Noni Pettinger [00:05:22] Ironically, when you study this and when you’re in environmental policy and planning, your main job prospects upon graduation are working for an oil or natural resource extraction company, manipulating the way that they store their trash. So that was a big wakeup call. And I basically kind of veered towards public policy implementation and the Forest Service, because the one thing I knew is that being outside made it all a lot more relevant to me. And I was in my early 20s and had too much energy.
Noni Pettinger [00:05:52] And so I went to the Forest Service and different versions or different roles for a couple of years, ending kind of culminating in being a wilderness ranger in Jackson, Wyoming, which in the Bridger National Forest, which is a pretty big program there. So so that was that.
Noni Pettinger [00:06:11] And ultimately federal positions for me are there very bureaucratic. They’re very slow. There’s policy or process improvement happens at federal executive level. So. I found it wasn’t a good match for the type of work and problem solving that I wanted to do so.
Noni Pettinger [00:06:32] So from there I started looking at. I was just doing a bunch of reading about. Kind of like a.
Noni Pettinger [00:06:41] Community Design Solutions. And I read some article like just like one article where every single person reference in the article was, quote, used to be an architect for the blank firm. And so from that one magazine article, I started having the idea of recognize that people who studied architecture or had practiced did not want to be architects, but had really amazing Problem-Solving abilities, and they had the tools to approach lots of different problems. So I started looking at MRC programs and kind of followed that track.
Gareth McGlynn [00:07:14] Very good. Very I like I like the pivot. I mean, one article, OK, but it seemed as if well, you were always going to be a problem solver no matter what you would then to the construction architecture.
Gareth McGlynn [00:07:28] Was it literally there and then or did you do a little bit more of a dove into it and say, yeah, this is. I wanted to drive past a major building, the landmark building, and go. I had something to do with that.
Noni Pettinger [00:07:40] No, definitely, it was not like an I’m a student of architecture at all. I’ve always been. I would always love doing kind of hands on monumental projects. I’m pretty creative as a kid growing up. Lots and lots of support for that from my family. And basically, I want to an earmark program pretty blindly. And also, I was living in a small town. I was like ready to move on and get a different life and be back in California, in inner city. So.
Noni Pettinger [00:08:11] I kind of went blindly and immediately just found a really good fit for a studio culture and with model like kind of the bending spoons you have to do to take. Either like sections and 250 plans and turn it into something 3D. Especially when you get into an irregular form languages. And that, to me, either manual or digital fabrication started immediately with the draw for me. And I still am a terrible student of architecture. I remember. I don’t I’m not good at architectural history or art history.
Noni Pettinger [00:08:44] I rely on all of my friends in the field to educate me to be good. I’m really focused on studio and fabrication and. Yeah. So right away I was hooked.
Gareth McGlynn [00:08:58] That’s what I was going to say. Did that just catch you right away? Was that during Masterji? You said, you know what? Everybody everybody finds their names show where everyone gets their specialism. Did you get it very early on or did you kind of like other parts of architecture?
Noni Pettinger [00:09:13] I think I would not have recognized that that was going to beat me. I didn’t understand enough about the profession or the broader field to understand that that could be a specialty. It took me a really long time to understand that that could actually be an area of focus professionally. But no, I just loved it and I didn’t doubt it. And it was the thing that I. Yeah, I definitely. I’m terrible at analyzing architectural position papers from different like just I’m interested in philosophy around it and really driven by the physical realities of building things, especially when it came to digital tools where it was supposed to be perfect and why it wasn’t working out. And what were the tolerance issues and how to manipulate the materials to better address that.
Gareth McGlynn [00:09:59] Very good. And then obviously qualified 2015. Where did you go from there? Did you do an internship during your Masters? Were you work in Junior Masters?
Noni Pettinger [00:10:08] Yeah. So I worked and worked at Test Schweizer’s office at Devon Wiser and Peter Testa in.
Noni Pettinger [00:10:14] And so I started my Masters in San Diego at an accredited school. That honestly was abysmal. And then from there I had an instructor mentor that kind of shepherd me toward separated me towards better school. So I went to psych and basically started over again after a full year. And it was great because I got to hit the ground running. And Zurich is a place that at the time under en mass was incredibly building focused and had a lot to do with digital fabrication. And a lot of the a lot of the instructor offices there were really focused on it, whether it was pavilion architecture or actual construction administration. There was a lot to learn there. That said, it’s a weird place. So basically, I found a good home and a wiser and I worked for that home during the school year. And then during the when I did have summers off, which was like two summers during left for four plus years, I was in grad school, I would go back to Wyoming and work for those high end luxury residential from there because Jacksonville is a playground for the hyper wealthy.
Noni Pettinger [00:11:23] So I got to know a lot about interior design, high detail assemblies, kind of like Windows systems, all the other traditional architectural things. And it was really interesting. And also the entire time I didn’t feel like I felt like I would have had to compromise what I loved working on a lot to follow the regular architectural step like approaching licenser. It was just seemed irrelevant to me.
Gareth McGlynn [00:11:52] Look good. Good. And then where did the blue Baltic’s or the aerospace start coming into it or develope?
Noni Pettinger [00:12:00] So a test, a wiser test, a wiser studios that I was in a lot of them. I take the electives that they taught were all in the Siah robotic house robot house. So had exposure to it there. And but it was kind of a stand to the way that I interpreted it. There was more like. Robots as a means for architectural representation, using digital files, though, like the drawing behind me was like an airbrush painting done with an arm. Based on, you know, scripting about like a hair on a body, like fur for an animal or something. So.
Noni Pettinger [00:12:42] I didn’t get deep it as deep as I would have loved to on that, because I think if I had been in more advanced robotic application classes or if I’d done my thesis on that, which is a huge missed opportunity still in my mind, it would have would would’ve led me quicker to this type of work that I’m working on now, which is.
Noni Pettinger [00:13:04] Still, issues of resolute tolerance and accuracy, which is when you want a machine to do some bang. How close is it? How far apart is it from the digital file and the physical world? So I would have loved to get more into that. But as it did, I focused again on fabrication and I did a thesis on them, kind of like a design and build project in L.A., which I learned a lot. Felt like I had to test the regular architectural bounds to see what my job would be. And then I went back to that firm and worked full time. And basically spent all of high, would go to work and then I would stay up all night writing grants to work on digital manufacturing and fabrication type of research. So I started my own LLC and I applied for a couple of NSF grants and received some starting funding to do. Basically is like pays for the proposal that you just put together to pay for the full SBIR scope of work because it was just me. Which then got never won one of those. I wouldn’t have known what to do with it, though. I just kept spending more and more time on this and I would volunteer at the high school fab lab, which in Wyoming is like amazing that they have won, but. There’s not really much vocabulary around what those schools are good for.
Noni Pettinger [00:14:20] That all kept going until I was looking at the Peer nine residency program and kind of formulating a proposal for what type of work I do. And it was very much focused on just just the same issue over and over again. Like. How how accurate is your fabrication? With no, I didn’t really have the sophisticated understanding of what the meaning of that study was yet. I just wanted to work on it more. And through that application process, I reconnected with a mentor from school. He was working at S.W. Keller and Associates and he suggested that combine that I basically reformat the research proposal to be more in line with what the fabrication challenges of color were and that we apply for it and that I apply for it as an employee of color. So that was a great suggestion and it worked out. So I got to dig into the technological problems that Keller was focusing. We were looking at. There’s application of aerospace manufacturing tools to complex form or we were looking at. Kind of like tool path optimization work for five access Melling or robotic milling. So we have to then I went to the next phase.
Gareth McGlynn [00:15:34] Guzzo biggest killer was I think that was when who you were working with. When I, I watched a video with Autodesk University just before this podcast.
Gareth McGlynn [00:15:44] And you spoke very well. Avoid a particular project, Allianz Theater renovation in Atlanta. That was at one of your first projects. And give us a little bit of a feel for how that project came about, because it was a fascinating video. But also the end product was simply stunning.
Noni Pettinger [00:16:02] Yeah. There Kellers work is. Christine, it’s amazing. They put they’ve really. Developed a lot of manufacturing or a very highly complex engineered fabrication work that just.
Noni Pettinger [00:16:18] It’s so precise and so perfect looking, and that has material sensibility to it. That is just absolutely perfect. So the Alliance project was already on the books by the time I got there. They’ve been working on engineering for a long time because as is typical with a lot of fabrication work, they had worse. They reached a partnership with the architect and anybody else involved, like the other subcontractors that would be kind of touching the system. And their first step is to rationalize it surfaces. So they spent months working very closely with freehand architects to do. And the acquisition, who was designing the Pantanal optimization. So they worked from kind of like a a curvy form language to. You know, is this chorus? Is it solid? And then from there, you kind of trace it back to what are the structural and connection implications of that. So they had already developed all this form language and it was in the.
Noni Pettinger [00:17:15] And then they had started to fabricate. And what they were finding is that. So this is. Complex double curvature, big sweeping balconies that has a representation of a surface that is actually hundreds upon hundreds of half inch. Like steam bed.
Noni Pettinger [00:17:36] OK, stringers that approximate this curve and then the the distance between the stringers is biometrically organized to allow for more or less ferocity, for sound absorption or reflection. So just really, really, really complex. And. Difficult to build type of forms. So what we’re finding is that basically their analog templating methods were not working. So they would try they would build the armature. So it’s kind of like a steel still beam holds a steel column, holds a box, holds a fin, and then we’ll receive all these horizontal stringers. And any templating that they were doing was causing more. It wasn’t working and they weren’t sure which part wasn’t working because there was no real way to measure all of those. There’s no easy way to measure this type of curvature across multiple elements.
Noni Pettinger [00:18:23] So, for example, they would need to if they knew this. They got to the armature point and then they needed to know the layout for these stringer parts. They would print hundreds of small stuff like long skinny strips of paper with tick marks running down them. And those tick marks would indicate like an address centerpiece of a stringer location. So they would tape it up against a vertical fin and then try to register those points by transferring it manually with pencil onto the fin. And then you would do that for the entire assembly as it sweeps across. And then you take these, you know, steam that would only has a certain workability period. So they would try to tack it on there. And basically they were finding that like. Errors in this templating were causing a visual defect that it didn’t look as perfect as a parametric patterning needed to be. And like the problems were as simple as. It’s humid when you’re doing steam bed, would assembly and paper, it doesn’t respond well to humidity and it deforms and it stretches and it was like. Yeah, so and then they couldn’t even move past that point. To understand if they’re armature had some kind of an accuracy that was causing some kind of form problem. So when I came on, they had already acquired a 3D projector from one vendor that honestly just had a terrible interface and terrible software. It really wasn’t really adaptive to use with the platforms that we were running like. Any type of curb export was just it was just really low functionality.
Noni Pettinger [00:19:59] So by being at Pier nine, it’s starting to just you know, I have these visions of like going to Pier nine, being like immediately on the robot and like like having a laser connected to it. But I basically spent the residency is traditionally four months long and I basically spent like four months. Calling people within Autodesk network. This is like the real beauty of that residency is that you have people will respond to your technical questions even when you don’t know really what you’re circling around yet. So I spent months like asking people in robotics and in kind of like carbon fiber lab software platforms how these tools really work and why they couldn’t work together. And basically, like through that kind of understood a little bit more about what we need did. And I approached a different vendor and we engaged in a better partnership to get a better predictor. And then we got this whole suite of software platforms and tools and support. And so then we were how they start using a different long story short, we got a better predictor and we could actually do well on performance.
Gareth McGlynn [00:21:05] Yeah. Because if anybody is going to put the link of I think it’s on your LinkedIn, I’m going to put the link to it on talk.
Gareth McGlynn [00:21:12] And it gives you loads of visuals as well as with. It’s fascinating. So what are the challenges? I mean, obviously the the Alliance Theater, we’re bottom right away. So they’ve given you the go ahead to be able to do all this research and and the robotics. What are the challenges then?
Gareth McGlynn [00:21:29] Forget the guys on site to be able to deliver this as technical as you say it is and digitally signed as it is. Surely the challenge is then onsite are are just incredible. And it’s it’s a constant battle. How important are those relationships in selecting the right contractor or shall contractor?
Noni Pettinger [00:21:50] This is the future of digital fabrication and like architecture is to align either digital literacy or willingness to try new things and kind of technology trust in your subcontractor agreements and tree structure. Because. So we had when we look at the prefabrication phase of this project, we have this really amazing situation where, like, the projector is incredibly accurate.
Noni Pettinger [00:22:20] So if anything that it is projecting upon is not in the right physical location. It won’t show the right information or it’ll kind of glitch and say like, no, they’re forced to project on.
Noni Pettinger [00:22:30] So we worked closely with our with the Keller shop staff and job captains to kind of. If the projector wasn’t showing the right thing, the first answer is, well, the projector is wrong because I can’t tell why it wouldn’t show this. So I’m just going to discount the information. And so we had to kind of go back to the drawing board and say. It might be that the physical surface that we’re trying to do this already is not accurate. So we went through this exercise of laser verifying every single component. So like the physical column that receives the big structural boxes that receives the fins and then would receive the stringer. So we kind of did an iterative verification process to get everything we’re accurate. So that then. You could project on the right surface. These are a 3D projector does not just projects a line that will be visible farther away. If you’re it projects a 3D line with two lasers. So if you’re if you’re trying to protect your hands and your hand is one inch behind the line, just won’t show up. It will only show up when there’s a surface. And the exact right 3D position according to the calibration of the projector. So this there was a great like light bulb moment where everything was. Better. Perfect. Have been furtively about very verified and then. One of the engineers was kind of like took one of the vertical fins and just like pushed it to the side. I think there’s a picture of it on the projector and all of a sudden it snapped. And like the fin itself snapped it to the right location and all the tick marks showed up on the edge. And so that was the first lesson or the first communication that worked to show all of the amazing craftsmen in the shop that. Like what the cause of error was and how to work around it and not just discount the digitally precise tools. Because we really were relying on it at that point. So that was a huge victory and it created a lot more trust. And then from there, we were able to take that same kind of mentality. And we developed a strategy around how are we going to like templating on a huge job site is full of tons of errors.
Noni Pettinger [00:24:40] And you’re working off of like manual measurements, physical data. And what we needed to work off of was something that was precise to the light, our scan.
Noni Pettinger [00:24:47] So from that, we kind of learned how to abstract. What were that edges that we needed to project on the floor or the wall? For the starting points of these columns and then these panels. But. And then we had our installers communicating the logic to the GC and other team members, so it it really was really exciting to see them.
Gareth McGlynn [00:25:08] I can imagine. Is it finished? Is that project completely?
Noni Pettinger [00:25:13] I think I’ve done pictures of it open. And I think like that team that worked really hard on it at Kellar. Is there up? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, everybody’s. That’s a huge success for that team. Made it so amazing. I also think that they haven’t gotten too. I don’t know if they’ve all got to go see it and really be in the space with all of the panels. I think some of them about to be there for installation, but not for the finished product, which they should be.
Gareth McGlynn [00:25:40] They should be. They should be there for the opening ceremony or the first show on the theater.
Gareth McGlynn [00:25:45] Surely I would like.
Noni Pettinger [00:25:47] Yeah, I, I think so too.
Gareth McGlynn [00:25:49] Okay, good. The invitation is probably in the post. So. OK. So the digital coordination, digital modeling, 3D scanning, where is the future of this. Is it only going to be embraced in certain sectors, certain industries of construction, or do you see it sweeping across all.
Noni Pettinger [00:26:10] It’s an interesting time to ask that question, because what we’re seeing now in construction technology is like this instant flip to the Jeezy’s lying on construction technology, like the construction technology market and demanding a lot more of it.
Noni Pettinger [00:26:27] Six months ago, everybody was like, I’m pretty sure we can get away with without this digital precision or without remote monitoring or construction, robotics, any of the things they like allow you to have a remote either data or spatial understanding. So now all those platforms are highly valued and as they should be because. I think there’s just a big industrial, real miss or cross industry mismatch between like people who understand the labor bosses understand the need for precision. Right. But they don’t understand the constraints of construction and then construction once robots, but they don’t really understand what the minimal viable conditions are to derive value from that. So I think what we’re seeing right now is a big push, even on the entry level kind of construction technology things. Products like video or remote video documentation or worker tracking type of chips and any kind of like automated robotic capture of stuff. It’s I’m really excited that this is the industry is getting a push in the right direction. I think that. There is a huge burden to entry for more precise instruction. It’s a very well-established industry. There’s a lot of protocol and tradition and actual like contractual legal standards that are really hard to change. I think the where the problem lies right now is getting a better, better handle on. Right now it’s Scampton verification because scanning is the only way that we can assess. We can compare our model to the physical world. And there is no time built into the traditional schedule structure for this type of work. So everybody is doing. We were talking before about companies that do or do not invest in preconstruction, engineering and preconstruction, engineering from the BDC standpoint and or from like the robotics standpoint, it is really different from PyCon in actual construction. So I just think that like that area of problem solving needs a lot more space. And I think now that it’s more of a priority that we need, you need to have more remote digital precision data on your job site. Maybe there will be more space for that moving forward.
Gareth McGlynn [00:28:42] It’s like we all know general contractors there. Their margins aren’t as big as a lot of subcontractors. A lot of the other people in construction. So they are seeing it. Where’s my return on investment here? Is this going to be an overhead?
Gareth McGlynn [00:28:54] Is this something I can build a client for? Where’s my return on my money? So I think listen, we talked about it before. There are general contractors out there that they’re investing heavily, but they’re also reaping the rewards of a secure in the projects, getting the technology and being able to market from that, but also being able to tie in with the best, most innovative architects and the clients that are looking for this as well. But where where do we see it moving from here? What’s going to be the first one that they say you’ve touched on? Quite a lot of them there? Yeah, we definitely need that.
Gareth McGlynn [00:29:27] And I think Koven 19 will accelerate that. Will it be robotics? Will it be feeding the lasers? Will it be drones? Will it be the the the the video on site? What do you is going to be there. Meanwhile.
Noni Pettinger [00:29:42] I think that a lot of those things you just listed are already on job site. It’s in piecemeal configurations based on an innovation manager to D.C. connecting with the right product manager at a technology company and establishing this relationship. So that’s there’s a lot there’s been a lot of effort on this in the marketplace and within certain markets.
Noni Pettinger [00:30:03] I think that. The main.
Noni Pettinger [00:30:09] Whether it’s a pre con consultants or a VTC firm or somebody, did you see that needs to own the preconstruction phase thing and risk when those people buy fully into the fact that more detail actually can reduce your risk? Instead of increase your risk. Right now, the current contract and liability structure. Nobody wants to own the detail and the precision and like the data that will show that there’s a problem, because if you own that, then you need to solve it.
Noni Pettinger [00:30:41] I think once we can more regularly show how many millions of dollars this type of precision can save if you just manage it correctly.
Noni Pettinger [00:30:49] If you give it time.
Noni Pettinger [00:30:52] You need to give your team time to process it and bring it in. And others, like analyze the data for what you need out of it. Then we can change basically the culture around risk and precision, and then we can start to move into a different model where it isn’t just the GC refusing certain accuracy because they don’t want to own the liability.
Noni Pettinger [00:31:11] And it isn’t the architect just saying like, well, we told you what to do.
Noni Pettinger [00:31:15] There’s just like middle middleground to be developed.
Gareth McGlynn [00:31:17] And you’re going to fill it.
Noni Pettinger [00:31:19] Yeah. And I have to say, I mean, structural products are the best. That is because that is the first time that you put something on a job site that needs the precision of the model and physical verification from a scan and low multiple types of localizing on the job site. And anybody working in that space with a pre fine or construction mindset understands that whole constellation of like colliding worlds. And so. Out of just sheer loyalty, that is the place that it’s gone. The problem’s gonna get solved by cross collaboration.
Gareth McGlynn [00:31:54] Good. No, if there’s someone because we get a lot of, like, interns, graduates listening to this. If there is someone that turns around and goes, you know what? Nobody’s 100 percent right. I am passionate about this. How would you recommend they get into your word?
Noni Pettinger [00:32:09] Again, this is another issue that’s really dear to my heart, because I from traditional architecture, I could not see me before I came to Kellar. I didn’t believe that there was like a fabrication job to be had. So soft knowing that there’s this really rich network of specialty fabricators all across the country.
Noni Pettinger [00:32:28] And you have to be Kellar, of course, stone concrete work, crise learning associates, many, many others that you can start to look up and reach out to them and kind of understand what their engineering network is. Additionally, then you can start to see really progressive architectural firms that have computational design departments. They’re also working. They’re thinking about.
Noni Pettinger [00:32:51] How they’re parametric models actually lend themselves to fabrication and construction. And then there are the construction automation programs are popping up in the United States. I mean, Stanford has a really exceptional industrialized construction program that really focuses on this kind of just doing again. You have to do like a bunch of Internet digging and reach out to people, especially right now. Everybody’s bailable. Everybody from this world is really helpful because they had to figure it out themselves in order to get into this small field. And I would just people then reach out and ask questions.
Gareth McGlynn [00:33:27] Good. And if they were to reach out to where is the place? Best place to get you?
Noni Pettinger [00:33:32] I think Dennis is the right format.
Gareth McGlynn [00:33:34] Excellent. No problem. Good. No. Just before we go, I want you to make a couple of bold statements. What’s what’s the future of your world look like?
Gareth McGlynn [00:33:45] And I want you to take not your current work or give away any secrets or the secret sauce. But give me give us an idea from a general contracting preconstruction point of view. What do they need to absorb? What do they need to change?
Noni Pettinger [00:34:00] My world is currently, quote, forever focused on automated layouts that could be for. A flow plan and layout. It could be for pinpointing a certain location and physical space. That’s different from the model. That is what I’ve been.
Noni Pettinger [00:34:19] That is where the connection of a robot to the 3D prospector at Autodesk worked on. That is what I was working on it. We work. Where’s working between the reality capture team and the field and robotics vendors? It’s been it’s a steady course that keeps guiding me. No matter what particular project I’m been working on or what company. When we can do automated layouts, so that’s like taking a drawing from the model. Doing whatever you need to do to coordinate it with a scan and a physical site and then driving like a mobile total station, basically the robot is almost irrelevant to the fact that you do all the robot doesn’t matter to you. All of the coordination around the actual physical information and then digital planning the next step in a messy answer. But like automated layout, good feature.
Gareth McGlynn [00:35:09] And you’re talking about digital planning there before you get to bring the bottle on board. That’s where does your specialism you get the digital side 100 percent. Then you bring in the robots and then it becomes a physical.
Noni Pettinger [00:35:24] Yeah. Even if you can’t perfectly coordinate it and you don’t have an eight percent resolution or understanding of where. Your you know, if your model is updated to the scan, for example, understanding where it’s not perfect or to what degree you can not trust the positioning of the robot based off of the model is also very important, because when you understand that, you can still get a lot of value out of automated positioning systems. You just need to there’s like a contingency factor, like how inaccurate is this and then what do we look like? What is our risk based on that understanding? So any efforts in this area are really, really important that they can. They really just have to enrich the understanding of what coordination can do. Yeah.
Gareth McGlynn [00:36:08] Very good. And I’m interested with we work. How difficult was it or how much did they embrace what you were doing and how easy was it convincing not only them, but also the subcontractors? But you’ve got to remember, we work have done projects all over the world. Was it embraced everywhere or did you work on a specific U.S.? Wait.
Noni Pettinger [00:36:29] Well, I went to work because they had a concentrated team of roboticists and construction technology specialists focusing on this type of issue, and so you had a really, really supportive network of people that could help you solve problems and help push things forward and then get kind of internal in the way that we are internally.
Noni Pettinger [00:36:50] Executed so many strategies was that we had an internal LGC. So that was we were construction with the company. So as the construction technologies specialist inside, you could kind of say, I’m going to solve this problem for you on this one job. If it goes very well, we will start to scale it up a little bit and I’ll learn more about, like, how it is or is not working. And that was kind of the that was also the approach we took with our robotic startup and hardware vendors where we would say, OK, because we have a little bit of control over what our situation is. We want to apply a new solution and then we’re gonna measure it. We’re gonna try again. And then we would make a prospective scale plan. So it was very, very supportive. But I think when you get into, you know, the giving and the downfall of we work with the scale at which they were growing and change and process improvement in that situation is pretty unwieldy. It is really hard to get enough planning done for a highly technical solution in order to execute it successfully. That said, one of the best parts of my job there was working with the field team and building consensus and aligning, you know, aligning our understandings of what the challenge was and what the value of a new solution would be. And I really, really enjoyed that part.
Gareth McGlynn [00:38:03] Fantastic. Noni. This has been an absolute pleasure. Something different for our network or our audience. Traditionally we would look at preconstruction and ask for meeting was in general, contractors, architects, owners, developers. This gives us another perspective. So thank you very much.
Noni Pettinger [00:38:21] Thank you. Great.
Gareth McGlynn [00:38:29] Well, what an interesting lady Noni is such a great insight into digital fabrication, architecture and the challenges the industry faces when it’s moving at such a speed. As always, please share. And like this episode where you preferred social media platform, I have some exciting news and announcements coming up over the next few months. So please stay tuned for those. And of course, so more great preconstruction guests.
