28.02.2023
Future of Design: Computer-aided neighborhood planning
Digital transformation is increasingly becoming a game changer for the real estate industry as well. It is a long-term process with the goal to build an adaptable and dynamic company with a corresponding business model and to be sustainably competitive. While the real estate industry discovered digitalization quite late for itself, the ECE Group already recognized the potential several years ago and set out to lay the foundations for a powerful digital transformation. The foundation for this is a digital agenda with concrete fields of action and projects.
Digitalization in Creative Design
Thus, the digital transformation is also continuously progressing in the ECE Creative Design department. A team of highly qualified architecture, master planning, interior design, and communication design professionals from all over the world is always working on future-proof, highly efficient ideas and concepts - across all asset classes. As a digital innovation driver, Creative Design focuses on efficient and data-based processes in the spirit of lean management. In addition to simplifying and optimizing internal workflows, the focus is primarily on the benefits for the customer. To develop real estate products with best-in-class designs, the experts carefully select the best digital tools available on the market to help optimize the project development process and timing on the architectural side. In doing so, the team not only has expertise in using the tools and programs, but also helps to continuously develop them by providing input in relation to market and customer requirements.
Ken Kuroda relies on the combination of know-how and digital support
Digital neighborhood planning with Generative Design
For example, the Creative Design team can use AI software to design an entire real estate site completely digitally and analyze it in real time. This is made possible by Generative Design tools used in the early project development stage. The resulting 3D models help architects keep options in mind from the start, according to external parameters such as the site and its boundaries, the terrain, or regulatory tasks. Further simulations, such as weather conditions, put the options to the test. By comparing several designs, the experts finally arrive at the best site solution based on drawings. Confounding factors are identified and eliminated early in the planning process. The result is efficient, accurate and fast site reviews and efficient planning of everything from master plan alternatives to optimized residential floor plans.
Using digital tools to find quick solutions: ECE architect Seda Tugutlu
Comprehensive overall impression
The goal is to convey a comprehensive overall impression of the planned real estate product - be it a new building or a restructuring. Thanks to their planning and architectural know-how, the experts at Creative Design, with the help of the digital tools, "arrive at the same or better solutions much more quickly," says Seda Tugutlu, an architect at Creative Design. She and her team not only use the tools successfully in the planning of complex construction projects, but also continuously adapt them in-house in the interface with the program developers - always with the aim of being able to map the customer's wishes even more precisely and with a minimum of risk. "We do this using the full range of what a real estate developer needs," says Ken Kuroda, architect in Creative Design. "That, combined with our expertise, is what makes us so efficient and unique."
Bringing the product to life
Once the master plan is in place and the shell of the building and its units have been simulated, the next step is to bring it to life. Using other digital tools such as virtual reality 3D modeling and animation programs, the designers create vivid ideas of how the real estate impression can finally look and interact with its surroundings.