The first Design Intent Gap Summit brought nearly 50 industry professionals together around one central question: How can we better capture and carry design intent from early design through construction?
In this episode of What a Week, Dave Stutzman, Steve Gantner, and Elias Saltz recap the first-ever Design Intent Gap Summit in New York City, where architects, specifiers, contractors, estimators, owners, manufacturers, educators, and technology providers explored how Systems and Performance Descriptions (SPDs) could create a stronger thread of information throughout the project.
The conversation looks at using SPDs alongside BIM to document system-level decisions earlier, give estimators a better basis for preliminary pricing, reduce missing scope, and preserve information as a project moves between design phases and tools. Rather than waiting for every product and material to be selected, teams can define what they already know about a building system and continue refining that information as the design develops.
Perhaps the biggest question coming out of the Summit was also the simplest: If this approach could improve collaboration and continuity of design intent, why aren’t we already doing it?
Where is the friction for adopting this approach now?