Every architecture firm keeps its own version of the same product data. A 46-firm group wants a single materials data standard instead, and on Sept. 30 it named its first outside partner to help write it.
The Innovative Design Consortium, whose members include SOM, HOK, HKS, NBBJ, ZGF, Corgan, DLR Group, SmithGroup, Gresham Smith and HLW, picked Acelab as co-development partner for what it calls its first open data standard for materials, ENR reported. Acelab sells a platform that digitizes firms’ materials libraries and moves them into the cloud.
What the materials data standard is supposed to fix
The problem is familiar to anyone who has chased a submittal. Attribute names, units and certification records change from one manufacturer to the next. Each design firm then rebuilds that information in its own system, and some still keep it on internal servers or in filing cabinets. Materials run 40% to 50% of project cost, according to the consortium, yet there’s no shared digital way to describe them.
“Other industries solved this decades ago: banking has ACH, healthcare has HL7,” Jim Smell, the consortium’s technical product manager, said in a statement. His point is that architecture never agreed on what its data means, so files move between firms and tools but the meaning doesn’t. The consortium says it will define what a material is, which attributes describe it, and how those attributes tie to performance and compliance.
The membership gives it weight. The 46 firms employ an estimated 30,000 design professionals and deliver more than 10,000 projects a year. The group is organized as a public benefit corporation.
What Acelab gets, and what it brings
Acelab gets a seat in the working groups, contributor credit on the standard and reference implementation rights. In return it brings a schema that already covers more than 250,000 building products and a network it puts at more than 20,000 design firms and manufacturers. Executive chairman Dave Lemont, a former CEO of Revit Technology, said the consortium has “the scale and the mandate” to fix the problem and that Acelab’s job is to make sure the standard rests on real product data firms can use “on day one.”
That’s a reasonable pitch, and it’s also a commercial one. A vendor holding reference implementation rights to an open standard has an obvious head start when the standard ships. Openness will be judged by whether competing platforms and manufacturers can implement it on equal terms, not by the press release.
What’s missing from the announcement
Neither the consortium nor Acelab has published a draft schema, a governance process or a delivery date. Manufacturers haven’t been named as participants, and they’re the ones who’d have to populate the fields. ACH and HL7 took years of committee work and regulatory pressure to stick.
The useful comparison is closer to home. Exchange reported this week that Arcadis is loading its own engineering standards into Autodesk’s AI assistant. Both moves assume the same thing: AI tools are only as good as the structured data underneath them. One firm is doing it privately. Forty-six are trying to do it in the open.
Specifiers should watch for two signals over the next year: a public draft, and the first large manufacturer that commits to publishing product data in the format.