The HP – Press Event 2009 was recently held in Barcelona, Spain. The two-day event included a tour of the Institute of Advanced Architecture (Iaac) in the center of the city accompanied by formal presentations from members of the HP Research Print facilities in nearby San Cugat together with a tour and presentations at those facilities. This included demonstrations of many HP large format print products together with a question answer period. Francois Martin of HP opened the event explaining the relationship of the company to the Iaac. “We are designing products that many architects use,” he said. The company is also sponsoring the ‘City of the Future’ initiative for 2009. Martin indicated that the overall market for large format print solutions had declined by about 50%, and that was attributable to the decline in activity throughout the construction industry. The current numbers indicate that 2010 will see growth in the neighbourhood of 4%.
Need for change
Something had to change under the current circumstances, “we are moving from being known as a print company to a design communication company,” Martin said. That in reference to the fact that this part of the larger HP company wanted to become known as a design communication entity.
Guayente Sanmartin, marketing director for HP worldwide print solutions indicated through a series of slides entitled ‘New Rules’ that the market was also changing and that people using print in their work flows were approaching it differently, often with collaboration and more sharing expectations. “HP equipment can be found in 95% of worldwide AEC projects,” she said. Many of the customers today “do not rate image quality or resolution as their highest need when printing,” Sanmartin mentioned. That was in reference to the fact that HP has solved those issues since the technology has matured and the ability to print excellent document clarity efficiently has now been achieved.
Print in the design process
“The need today is to be able to collaborate among users, integrating HP technology into their work flow needs – both digitally and analog,” she said. Sanmartin see’s print technology as a bridging technology to cross between users within the design process.
For example, very projects are established today without the wide involvement of many professionals. Architects work with engineers, construction managers work with structural engineers and operational managers work with suppliers and so on.
As these people collaborate at higher levels, their need is to share design documentation, including drawings, sketches and other information between each other.
The design process today is seen as a collaborative process that involves a number of different users who rely upon print technology to describe their work at different places. About 70% of all construction sites, for example, are enabled through the Internet. Consequently, the idea that design inforrmation can be shared both within office and work sites places unique demands upon print technology, both in terms of moving betwen locations and people, but also through technologies between offices distant locations – where different members of the design team might be located.
The 24 hour workday
The concept of the 24-hour workday is also impacting the design process. Many team members for a given project can be located around the world. The Internet is a requirement for integrating them into a continuous stream of communication, but HP seeks to build upon that collaboration need through moving more directly into the video communication area.
Products like HP SkyRoom are an example of this.This product is a low cost video collaboration software that works quickly to transmit images and documents between users computers screens.
The longer range vision of this product will enable markup and review of documents that may be scanned from the work site, and then re-integrated into project databases.This is an example of the digital-analog-digital work flows. The professions involved in the design process may not be changing, but the technology surrounding the design processes is rapidly changing.
Drawing for communication
Most architectural competitions today will include a contest that involves each architects work. This is often the opportunity for these individuals to pitch their work from the design idea to the decision making process. Drawings need to become more highly intelligent, rapidly produced through the final decision phase, the execution phase and the construction phase.
The people who are constructing advertisements, designs, marketing material – all related to the project – need to be able to work with tools and data in a simplified way. As high technology becomes more deeply embedded into the work flows, then individual user access and use becomes easy and quicker. HP’s goal is to simplify this process further, enabling higher levels of collaboration through the print related design and communication processes. To do this there are four requirements:
Drivers to use include :
Vincent Guallant – Director Iaac
Vincent Guallant is director of the Iaac program at the University Catalonia. His interest lies in residential projects and landscape including urban master plans and software development. Dedicating part of his time to education projects and investigations at the Iaac he began with the program in 1998.
In 2000 that effort led to collaboration with Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and he would later lead the first project oriented to the intelligent house based on distributed cumputerization.
“Today we have students from 24 countries,” he said. He indicated that the core idea behind the Iaac was to ‘learn while doing.’ Indeed, a quick look around the Iaac reveals a host of materials, designs on the walls and projects in different stages of development. “We want to be able to design with the idea of energy types,” he said. Many of the projects on the walls surrounding our visitation included examples of this where solar energy, biomass, wind and wave energies were involved, nature playing a prominent role in many of the designs.
“People should be able to design and deliver fabrications anywhere in the world,” Guallant indicated. That thought again suppoting the need for collaboration between sites and people. Building on that idea is the concept of educating about design through the use of the Internet. Thus, from these observations the connection to the changing nature of HP to embody the communication element seems much more obvious.
A Solar Decathlon was recently held in Washington and a similar Solar Decathlon Europe will be held in 2010. Research and development from the Iaac is also underway for EXPO 2012 to be held in Warsaw, Poland.
Life beyond the foam core
HP set out to discover from it’s worldwide users what they were thinking and doing. That involved travelling around the globe to visit with them. Laura Vidal of HP was charged with the responsibility to discover this information.
“Mosr of our customers only use part of the technology capabilities,” she said. “They spend 3x more time doing marketing related work as compared to design and other functions,” she said. In other words, sharing their designs and collaborating with others in network fashion rated highly to most HP product users.
Visiting architect Claudia Collmar of the IN SITU Estudio de Arte y Arquitectura in Sanata Cruz de Tenerife discussed some of the project work that she is involved in. Collmar currently works between the location in Grande Canaria and Barcelona. When asked how her own studio has changed over time, she explained that she is working with 15 people between locations and has networks to other efforts and networks in the region. She showed a recent project entitled My Red H located in Girona, Spain.
Tour San Cugat
The HP San Cugat facility is just outside Barcelona a short distance. There several thousand people work on HP print related research development. Our tour involved a demonstration of several products including the new HP Designjet T1200, Designjet T770 and Designjet 620. Several new software solutions designed to enhance user experience were also announced. A new HP Carbon Footprint Calculator is also included in these products to calculate environmental impact level.
The focus of these new printers is upon CAD/GIS/AEC markets. They are fully Internet enabled and include several features oriented toward enabling these types of workflows. In one case we saw the printer ‘remember’ what kind of paper it was using then reloading it automatically and formatting it properly. These printers are designed on the principle of simplification. Accordingly, they are meant to be used by teams collaborating in the CAD/GIS/AEC space who simply – want to print.
Summary
HP had to change. They have correctly identified that the work flows around the use of print are changing. At the same time, new technologies and working techniques in other areas are supporting the view that collaboration and sharing are key aspects for most organisations to accompllish their work today. We should not be mislead that some highly capable people are still designing excellent printers, they are, but HP is embarking upon a course that will leverage those talents to the widest possible audiences over the Internet, based on collaboration and with easy-to-use interfaces. That sounds like a recipe for a positive future to me.I have a nagging feeling that HP held back. They are working on something and we will likely hear much more soon.
More Information:
Read the blog report of this event here
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Jeff Thurston is editor and co-founder of Vector1 Media. He is based in Berlin.
Transparency statement: HP supported in part the costs to attend this event.
