Walk the Line: Dave Flynn from matterlab and KOPE
We caught up with Dave Flynn, Co-Founder at matterlab and KOPE, to talk about the technology that's transforming offsite in some fascinating ways.
Listen to the interview here, or read on below….
Dave, could you tell us a little bit about yourself and your career?
“I’m one of the co-founders of matterlab, and as a company we’re also developing a product called KOPE.
I trained as an architectural technician and during the twenty years I’ve been working in the industry, I’ve worked as a CAD Manager, and also as a BIM Manager for the likes of KPF, Grimshaw and Amanda Levete Architects.
Originally, my co-founder and I were both at the core of big construction projects: we would be at the end of the production process to get everything across the line. We got to a point where we were saying, "You know what? There are enough tools out there like Dynamo, Grasshopper, some of these more computational tools, that we can actually start to streamline this." So, we left the industry and set up Designtech, which was a computational BIM consultancy.
When we decided to set up matterlab, we wanted to take that to the next level. We wanted to build small products that would sit in our customer's workflows. We started to build tools for BIM 360, and started to work very closely with Autodesk.
matterlab were engaged by ilke Homes, a volumetric modular builder, and they completely changed how we worked as a business. We went from focusing on the Autodesk space, pre-COVID, to learning about volumetric modular, which was unbelievably different for us.
Just before COVID hit, we were able to visit their factory and meet the team. We decided that we were going to try to revolutionise what they were doing inside the design team: we focused on automating processes, getting rid of manual work on drawings and being able to push information from their models into their machining on the factory floor.
It has been quite a journey for us to be able to say, “What does a consulting piece look like for a volumetric builder? We're going to build you a product that sits within Revit. How do we then make that agnostic?” and that's where KOPE was born.
KOPE means ‘Kit Of Parts Engine.’ The idea behind that was to say, “There are lots of reasons for us to take design information; 3D models, reports, schedules, ERP, PM systems, and push them across into manufacturing in a really, really fast way.” It’s incredibly complex because you've got lots of players, lots of tools and lots of designers.
What does the team look like? Are you a team of coders first, or is a team of people with architectural backgrounds, or maybe manufacturing?
It's a mix of all those things: we have a core consulting group and then we have those developing KOPE as a tool for the industry. You need to have software developers and computational designers in your team. And as the market evolves, we fill that role for a lot of our partners. We also have the second side of the team, which is the core original matterlab team: lots of computational designers, algorithm writers, architectural engineers, and a couple of technicians.
Dave and some of the matterlab team
You mentioned that visiting ilke Homes was your first time in a volumetric factory, how did you find that?
We were expecting robots, to be honest, we were expecting flying cars and cool tech. And we got there, and it was a very formal construction process under a roof. It was very clinical, how everything moved through each station, but the technology didn't feel exciting. It felt how I would expect a building site to feel, just much tidier and more organised. Since then, ilke have really pushed on with their automation and digitisation plus we’ve also been to the Top Hat and Countryside factories. It’s been wonderful to see the differences in the way that they all work.
I don't think that anyone has the best solution yet, very much including us. It's going to take a lot of collaboration in the industry to get there. I think our work with ilke has been an opportunity for us to learn as much as possible about them, but it's also been an opportunity for us to speak publicly about some of the things that we think could be done better with technology, for example bridging the gap between the designers needing changes, and seamlessly integrating those changes into the production floor.
Were there specific moments where you remember thinking, “This is the direction we need to take the company”?
ilke needed to be able to place content into a 3D model and have it show on drawings really quickly. We said, “We've got the consulting experience and enough scripts to be able to do this work.” Initially, it was a very small piece of work, but then we thought maybe it could be incorporated into every element being placed on the factory floor. At the time we didn't fully understand the scope of that: it has taken two years and it's still an ongoing process.
One of the big things we learned working with ilke was the notion that none of these volumetric companies have a product. They don't have a singular element that they're able to reproduce. We quickly had to adapt: there is no fixed product, but how about we have a fixed agenda, a fixed process and a fixed vision, then all the subtleties of design can be flexed using computation.
What has this system meant for those on the factory floor at ilke, and the business more widely?
When we started, there was a considerable design team just making Revit updates. We're big fans of Revit and have been using it for a long time, but when you want something that's ultra-standardised it doesn't really work. Since starting we have reduced the headcount of people needing to process Revit content, and have instead been able to use that resource elsewhere in the business. We've pretty much removed AutoCAD from the process, which was very much a legacy and have been able to streamline that down.
In addition to that, we’ve seen a huge change in their ability to iterate at speed. We’ve transformed their ability to have something that will almost equate to a digital twin of a module. If you go into the brand new house types that ilke have, you've got a one-to-one representation of every panel, every fixing, all the insulation pieces, all of the MEP; everything is there one-to-one. So, we're able to slice and dice those models and see exactly what's in them. It really opens up the opportunity for Sales to utilise VR and AR when pitching to potential customers.
Having worked so closely with volumetric companies, have you noticed any patterns? Things that the industry is excelling at, or struggling with?
“It seems that institutionally there is a lack of understanding of exact cost and exact material, and that waste is just a given, but that’s not the world we live in anymore. ”
One of the things that we're focused on, and that we're seeing in everyone that we're working with on offsite has been to say, “We want to know exactly what is in this panel, this system, this module.”
There are no tools at present capable of giving you that precision.
What we've been focused on is to say, actually there are certain rules you can use. For example, if you are wrapping a module in a membrane, that membrane is going to be wrapped and then another layer is going to be wrapped. But the overlap of those two is not calculated. We're not necessarily understanding that if we change this, we're going to have more efficiency across the module, or if we overlap by an extra 10%, we're going to get this performance change.
We have been working very closely with a few different companies to understand they can get that bill of materials absolutely nailed, before tying it into their suppliers. This is also one of KOPE’s core goals in trying to open the transparency of what's available on the market, which is a real issue across the whole industry.
What problems is KOPE designed to solve for volumetric manufacturing companies?
There are some incredible manufacturing skills in this country, and there are also very good regional products that are not necessarily used across the country, so we’ve been working alongside Cast Consultants to build a marketplace called MMC Market.
We want to open that up and say:
“to be able to transport something across Britain is significantly better than trying to buy something from China. And if you’re able to understand the logistics of that purchasing process, and it fits into your procurement strategy, you’ll be able to make sure that your buildings are going to be better and more effective”
We also want to be able to instantly implement exactly what that product is into your design. It is exciting for us to have the potential, with the right resources, to create quality homes faster with less waste.
Could you tell me about some of your successes in the last 12 months?
Amazingly, we went to the Building Awards last year and won the technology category, which was a massive shock. After that huge success, we actually had our toughest few months working on the tool, and I think the energy from the win carried us.
Digital Construction Award, Winner: Ilke Homes and Matterlab
I think the biggest thing outside of the structural changes within the business has definitely been going through the investment process. Half of the people who've invested in us have been working on KOPE with us. I hope a few people who are listening to this have had a similar experience in that spending other people's money when building technology is terrifying, but it's also incredibly exciting. It lifts the energy of the team because there's something about wanting to repay that faith and to really deliver for people.
I think the other exciting thing for us now, is that we're starting to have people come to us as opposed to us having to chase. And certainly, from the world of consulting, that's a really big shift.
Looking ahead, what exciting things will you be working on over the next 12 months?
We’ve really been working on whether there is a way for us to get to a point where we have near zero material waste on construction projects.
Processes do exist where you're basically calculating and optimising the way that the sheet might get cut, but we're trying to be a bit more holistic. We're trying to be a bit more open and say, “Well actually if you have four of these pieces of waste across four modules, they can be combined to create something for you in another module.” We're trying to partner with the right companies to understand them and then to do what we do best, which is to say, “Well, actually if we add the right piece of code here, we're able to give you an opportunity to save that material.”
The other side of things at the moment is definitely on reducing cost. We live in a world where costs are changing at a terrifying scale and a terrifying speed. What we want to do is to create that environment where people have a little bit more control over what they have and not necessarily be so beholden to someone's Excel equation which they wrote 10 years ago on how something should be calculated.
What are the opportunities for technology within offsite at the moment?
All of us, particularly in the type of companies that the two of us are in, strive to do something better. I think the issue that we have typically comes down to the way that people interact with each other and the expectations of how certain things are done.
“But there’s an opportunity here to change things up a bit. There is a change and there is a new generation coming through who have basically only ever done things in a digital sense, really basic things won’t be commonplace for them.”
I think there have been a few things happening in the industry at the moment where people have said, “We're going to do a platform. We're going to have pre-designed kit parts from a pre-ordained supply chain.” But as a small company, how exactly do you enter that supply chain or platform? Therefore one of the things that we're trying to do with KOPE is to be IFC first.
We're going to allow people to write their own code and to write their own algorithms that they can keep for themselves. And then we're also going to be opening up to any supplier, what we need to do is to make the entry point for technology as low as we can.
What do you think is needed for offsite to take root and become the main way that we build?
Well, I think one of the big things that we really got hit with directly in relation to our lack of knowledge, when we started working with ilke, was around certification. It's an unbelievably complicated process. Of course, we do need a very robust process to certify exactly how these builds and systems perform and how these products act under stress, but I think from our limited experience, we've really struggled to understand exactly the implications of that. It’s difficult to make sure that when those two systems meet each other, they perform in a very particular way.
I think it's something that we all need to address more directly if we're going to get things moving towards offsite with a bit more speed. For example, is there an opportunity for certification to be a bit more data-driven, or transparent in the way that it works, something that we can interact with as an industry?
Is there a question that I should have asked you today, but I haven't?
I think certification is just such a big aspect of what we're trying to do. Opening up that supply chain and understanding its impacts is definitely an aspect of the industry that I think that we should probably all be talking about a little bit more. If we were to do this again, we would definitely discuss the supply chain in more detail.
And to end, who are you passing the mic to next?
“I’m passing the mic to Nigel Banks at ilke Homes. Nigel’s leading the ilke Zero product to deliver zero carbon homes at zero extra cost. It’s a ground-breaking project!”
