At a conservative capitalization rate of ten percent, this hundred-billion dollars or so in potential savings would justify an investment of roughly one trillion dollars—which is more than we invest every year in designing and constructing buildings that only serve to increase the dissipation of wasted energy. Recent pilot projects suggest that 3-D modeling may add as little as 0.05% to total project costs, and intelligent 3-D modeling at the preliminary design phase is absolutely essential to energy efficient design.

Now, if Johnny can model a trillion dollars worth of buildings at an incremental cost of 0.05%—or $500,000,000 per year, and the potential energy savings that might accrue from that modeling amount to $100,000,000,000 per year, what is Johnny's return on investment (ROI)? Leaving aside the net present value of future annual savings in the operation of this year's crop of buildings, the first-year ROI benefit looks like 20,000% (one-hundred-billion in savings generated by five-hundred-million in modeling costs is a two-hundred-fold return).

Granted, this is a grossly over-simplified hypothetical example, but even if it were 99.9% wrong, the return is still 20%—likely way better than anything in your 401k retirement account.
JL


Profile: A Trip up Cyclotron Road—Lawrence Berkeley Lab
As Hearst Avenue nears the northeastern, uphill corner of the U/C-Berkeley campus, the street abruptly breaks with the urban grid and launches a steep, switchback ascent of the semi-wild Blackberry Canyon. Hearst gives way to Cyclotron as the road enters the well-guarded precincts of the Ernest Orlando Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBL), one of the spawning grounds of "Big Science." Ascending to one of the high points of the LBL campus, the road arrives in front of Building 90, with a breathtaking panoramic view that encompasses all of San Francisco, both bridges, the Marin Headlands, and more to the north and south. Here, in the Building Technologies Department of the Labs' Environmental Energy Technologies Division, you are at the epicenter of building energy research and much of the simulation, interoperability, and virtual building software development that goes with it.
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Proceedings: Bay Area Computer Graphics Exhibit
This year marked the second time I had the honor of joining the judges' panel for this prestigious competition among Northern California designers. The current advanced state of design software tools and designer fluency with these tools brings to mind recent judging experiences in the ACADIA International Design Competition, Bentley's 2002 Success Awards, and the last two iterations of the annual Graphisoft Prize. What are today's cross-platform, cross-cultural, and crossover issues in design representation?
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The LaiseBoy^™ Philosophy, Part 5—Of Red Herrings and Rotten Fish
The term "red herring" originally referred to a device to throw hounds off the scent, and has come to refer to any sort of intentional misdirection. To investment bankers the term describes preliminary prospectuses that bear a line of red type across the cover and that may, in their incompleteness, be misleading. Red Herring also is the name of a magazine, the "ethics policy" of which recently came to our attention. Laden with self-congratulatory prose (no doubt justified) regarding "journalism" versus "conflicts of interest," Red Herring's policies stand in sharp contrast to the LaiseBoy Philosophy. They avoid interests that conflict with their self-definition of journalism. This publication most avowedly is not journalism, and therefor—by definition—cannot incur any conflict of interest in that respect. In fact, while their journalistic ethics prevent them from getting "too close" to their subjects and subject matter, our passion for our subjects requires that we get as close as possible, bringing you insiders' insights in ways that no self-described journalist—by definition—can ever achieve.
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LaiserinLetterLetters^™
An occasional sampling of reader electron-mail, or "keep those waves and particles pouring in, folks!"
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Laiserin's Lemma^™—Computer-Aided Mistakes^™
Some copies of last weeks Lletter^™ were emailed with a garbled title for one story in the table of contents and feature briefs. It was the kind of error that can only occur in the world of computer-based, cut-and-paste, template-formatted publishing—inserting some current text over only a portion of the previous text. Not a serious error; certainly no one's life, health, or safety was at risk. Yet, this sort of computer-aided mistake is pervasive in every field of endeavor, from newsletter publishing to medical diagnostics and treatment to—yes—design documentation (whether of public infrastructure, buildings, or manufactured products). As design software becomes both more capable and more complex, the risk of undetected or undetectable error likely will increase (even so-called parametric systems can be no more consistent in their output than the consistency of those rules, locks, and constraints that govern their input). Does this raise or lower the bar of design professionals' "standard of care"?
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