 Boom, what's up, everyone? Welcome to Simulation. I'm your host, Alan Sokian. We are still at COFES, the Congress on the Future of Engineering Software for our second annual partnership with them. We are now sitting down with Dr. Robert Graber. Hello. Hi. Thanks for coming on to the show. Really appreciate it. Thank you. Very excited. Are you coming here all the way from Germany? Yes. Yes. Well, headquarters in Germany, but, you know, I have a history in the Bay Area, so I love always coming back here. Yes. The Bay Area loves Germany. We love you very much. We love CAD very much, which is a lot of what you're focused on right now. Also focused on building serving, so we'll be talking about that, too. Robert's background is very interesting. He's now been 18 years as the CTO at Graber. Also, prior to that, did his PhD in Civil and Environmental Engineering at Stanford doing energy management in commercial real estate and impacts on building energy performance. So let's talk about this on a, on a, on your journey perspective. So, you know, how did this all, how did your interest even in this engineering and software get started? Sure. So I think even from a young age was always interesting computers, you know, gaming and but also trying to figure out how everything worked. My father actually was one of the very, so very first entrepreneurs in the sort of computing time. So that was always a role model for me. I basically did high school in Germany, but left to go to the UK when I was 16. I finished my high school there and then as a natural progression was to kind of go for an engineering or computing degree in London. And so that's what I did. I ended up doing a four-year degree and a master. As part of that, my interest got sparked in mobile devices. So this is pre-iPhone, pre-Android, the Windows Phone was just starting at that time. This is in 2000 or 1999. And I was interested in saying, is it possible to bring engineering software, which was, you know, what we'd had worked on in the company or my father's business, would it be possible to have that work in mobile, right? And so I took that one as a challenge and part of my sort of final year project was doing real-time graphics on mobile devices and then seeing can we take that even further and bring on a full CAD system onto mobile. And this is sort of my first real software project was CAD support product. And you mentioned building, serving. One of the questions we asked ourselves, why would you want to do CAD on mobile, right? Viewing, you could even use a PDF or something simple for that. Why would you want to have access to a full CAD system? And so I realized a lot of the jobs in which we actually consume CAD or create CAD have to do with the physical world, right? Whether that's in AAC when you actually, you know, you have physical spaces that we're designing here. So, or it's on the shop floor when you're actually making the product. And so we realized there's no real point in doing an architectural design package in the field, but doing a surveying package makes a lot of sense because now you're recreating the geometry from what's actually in the physical world. Okay, so when you're finding yourself getting first involved in engineering, your father is obviously this big role model for you getting involved. And then you're starting to figure out that you're kind of trying to position yourself somewhere within CAD, making it applicable for real world scenarios like, you know, building, surveying, making it easier for you said to have CAD on mobile. And this is somewhere where I don't think I've really heard this quite yet. Yeah, CAD on a mobile device versus on your desktop or laptop. Yeah, I mean, I want to hear more about the reasons behind that, but I want to also have you explain post. Was this at London when this was happening? So this is sort of at the tail end of my degree. I was really interested in this question about what's possible with these mobile devices, right? It was the first devices that went beyond the flip phone. They had a screen that touch interface. And so now, for the first time, you can envision more professional applications, not just telephoning and text messaging. And so that's something I explore with my real-time graphics. So I realized, hey, there is something possible. You can actually really drive 3D graphics on these devices. You know, I bought at a small space, but you could. And so I realized that if going back to Germany and joining my father's business would be a great way to explore that further. And that's what we did. We created a small team to start then building a mobile CAD package. A mobile CAD package. Now, but then you went to Stanford after London. So, no, I actually went to work for eight years. Eight years before. Wow. So I left academia completely, went to work, explored some of these topics mobile. We then did a big project of rethinking how our desktop catch would look like, the next generation of that. That's something I worked on for quite a number of years, building out a team to support that. And then as part of COVA is actually this conference, we got in touch with one of the professors at Stanford who was looking at the intersection of civil engineering and computation. Like, how can you use computational methods to drive change in the civil engineering field? Martin Fisher at SIFE, which is a Center for Integrated Facility Engineering. And we basically start talking about different topics that could be interesting. And over two or three years, having those conversations, we realized maybe it's the best would be for me to kind of join the PhD program. And I did that in 2009. Okay, okay, okay. So then now, before we get to the PhD program, so what were some of these in 2000 when you're putting together this team at Graber? What are you guys doing with CAD on mobile? Of course, the computation is so much less, the power so much less, the graphical capability so much less back then. So yes, so we first obviously looked at sort of visualization and markup. So one of the things we developed was the ability to embed voice messages into drawings. So you take your drawing outside, you embed a voice message saying, you know, you don't want to write it down, you don't have time. So you just make a voice message instead of it being a WhatsApp, whatever. It was actually embedded in the design. So not only does it have, you know, your notes but also has context and where exactly it was referring to, the same for pictures. And that was one use case. The other use case was really data collection. And so we have partners that would build, for example, GPS tracking software. We embedded the software and heavy machinery in the construction field where there were just terminals and we use a mobile CAD to really capture what was being done in the field. And the product that we built ourselves was really all around this idea of very efficient onsite plan production of drawings of existing buildings. Because owners have this problem that, you know, they design a building, maybe the designs are even lost, but the building changes over time. You need to capture what's actually there, either for rental purposes, for fire safety. We did lots of works in the UK with big retail brands. We did it with the prison authority because they just really need to get half up to date plans. And so that was sort of a part of our business that we've always kept working on because it was an ideal use case for mobile CAD. Okay, okay. So one of the things is, you know, when you're looking at CAD's capabilities back in 2000, you're thinking about how to augment it, make it more effective for both on a communication level between people that are working on the same project as well as make it more efficient for the environments that it's being put into like construction and leveraging already some of the newer technologies like sensor technologies, GPS. So what we're, you know, and then you kept teaching us that you were doing more of this work and trying to add onto the onto CAD. So then did it seem like there was something that was like sticking as you were adding things into CAD to make it a better tool? What were the things that you were seeing most people were wanting to see CAD to get better at? I think what we actually realized is that the CAD is an interesting underlying fundamental technology ready to create these designs, but we weren't necessarily working with CAD users. The CAD user is a typical person that sits in the office and, you know, works with a large screen. The person that's in the field is not a CAD user, typically. It's a surveyor. It is a maybe something that's not as skilled and, you know, desktop computers. And so we had to really rethink how we actually interact, how the user interacts with the product, make a much more workflow driven than, you know, this open set of 500 features that you can use in any order. No, you have to go through step from one to 10. We've evolved that product line actually over the last years into even more sort of specific niches. And one of those that we have today is the kitchen survey market. So it's a market where in Germany the customer would go to kitchen studio, design his kitchen with the seller. But they won't produce it until they've actually gone out to verify that the measure that would actually fit as details about where the outlets, how's the windowsill position, what kind of materials are we looking at? And so we would build a specialized solution and somebody who is a trained kitchen sales person has no problem picking up the software, understanding what is required of him, what measurements does he have to take. So fundamentally it's still CAD, but it's so much more of a workflow driven tool. And this is what we've seen always from the beginning. CAD is really like a fundamental building block for a lot of engineering software where the ideas you're presenting geometry or you have, and through the specific applications you derive meaning what that geometry actually represents. Is it a screw? Is it a wall? Is it something very different? And that's why so much engineering software builds on top of CAD. Yeah, when you're walking us through this really interesting realization about how when someone's behind the computer that is making the CAD, then what ends up happening is the person in the field is typically not someone that's making CAD. So then you have to have this degree of relatabilities for the person in the field to be able to use CAD in a way that at least visually that makes sense. And then there's this whole, that becomes this communication process. And what then was your big, you talked about the Stanford professor that helped you get moving into your PhD program. What was that fire under you that sparked you to also go and start studying? Well, I was obviously interested in kind of exploring some questions a little bit further that in an economic business context it's a little bit harder to keep asking the why question. At some point you're going to deliver a product that you can sell to customers, right? And so it was interesting as a completely different environment to understand to drive a little bit deeper. And so I thought my first conception when I arrived at Stanford was like, okay, I'm going to take this building serving specific question and I really drive a little bit deeper on that. But through sort of successive why questions we ended up with a very different or ended up with a very different PhD because I said, okay, well, why do we even measuring this, right? So the first question is why do you care about the data? So then one of the use cases we thought it could be for energy efficiency or energy management. You want to understand how efficient is this space? So then we started looking at, okay, well, how precise does the data need to be for it to actually make a difference in the energy calculation, right? So what degrees of precision are we looking for? Is it centimeters or meters? And you find out very quickly that the geometry really can vary by quite a lot for it not to have a significant impact on the energy. So then the question is why do we even go out to measure this? And then the question was why do we even want to do an energy model, right? Why would you want to, what's interesting in that? Well, you can say, well, maybe I have a goal of reducing the efficiency. And then I kept doing this. And then we kind of realized there's not really a uniform approach to doing energy management in the corporate real estate specifically. I picked corporate real estate for one point because it was large enough that actual energy efficiency could make a big dollar difference, right? If you save 10% on a million dollar bill, you're saving money. But it's also close enough to the core of sort of the management of the company that's visible enough that they could say, well, maybe it's useful for us to do so. And so I started setting different companies across the U.S. And I realized there's really very high degrees of professionalism or different degrees of professionalism in that industry today. There's even a challenge of using the correct terminology or the same terminology. And so I ended up really thinking about what are the methods that exist today, what are the methods that potentially could make sense and do the tools that are available really serve the industry well. And so I started with saying I want to measure spaces to basically saying, well, we need to first understand, we have to first generate a common language and a common practices around how we're going to deal with all this data that we're producing. And so from a very sort of technical starting point, we ended up with something that fundamentally was really about talking to people and understanding how they work today. Yeah, the idea of taking a look at something that seems to be a very common theme like a commercial building and being able to see it through a lens of how can I make it better. And not only how can I make the tools better for the engineers and designers, but also how can I make it more energy efficient. These are very important things to pass along with the way of thinking to younger people. How can I make things better than when I look around me? How can I design them to be better? And then did you end up experiencing success with changing the design of buildings in order to decrease the amount of cost of energy? Well, I think the point I was trying to make is that my realization is just simply to quantify is the building efficient is a very complicated question. And the second question is certain tools in the market are supposed to help you understand is your building efficient? But also is the building more efficient than it was previously? So you've changed the windows potentially, you've changed the lights, right? Is your building actually more efficient and do you have a good tool for helping you understand that? And that's actually not a very well addressed problem at this point. Even like energy expenditure. So you can look at energy expenditure, but there's a variable factor that impact that, right? Weather occupancy, among other things, opening hours, etc. But year to year you can see that in like June of 2018 versus June of 2019 that that's usually similar weather. So yes, so we're getting a little bit into the weeds right now. These are also interesting weeds that we like unpacking, yeah. So you typically use normalization for that, right? You say this year we had this many heating degree days and this year we maybe might have had a different number so we know when to normalize for that because we don't want to just look at the bare consumption. We want to look at consumption normalizing for weather, right? But then we want to look at normalizing for weather and occupancy. Yeah, because you may have gained employment by 10 or 20. And then the question is, okay, now let's put an example. I added 10% staff. It means the HPC is running extra hours to just kind of cool us down. Is that the building manager's fault? Right? So these are real questions, right? Saying, what are you interested in? What are you interested in measuring? Are you interested in measuring? Oh, interesting. Because then... Do you measure per person their next energy? Yeah, these are all relevant. These are all sort of questions you need to ask yourself what your end goal is. If your end goal is to get a plaque on the wall, which is what some people want to do. They want to show that they care about the energy efficiency. They want to have an energy star or whatever. Or is your goal to figure out how an efficient building in your organization should look like? Or do you want to figure out the big picture designs of the future? Yeah, and so there's a lot of... We ended up realizing that why people do these things, why people actually invest in energy efficiency, they do it for very many different reasons. We had some companies that we studied that really cared about dollars. They wanted to save dollars. And if they could get a two-year return on a lighting retrofit, let's do it. That's a gateway to invest our money. But some companies that really only cared about the messaging to customers or their own employees. Say, look, we take care of this, we care about the environment just as you do, and we're going to take care of one example of the space you're in. And we have other companies that wanted to show excellence. It was a custodian bank, and it's really hard for them to show their customers that they are very deliberate and thoughtful in how they approach business. And one way they could show it is by being very considerate about how they manage processes around the buildings. And one of those was how do we keep ever being more efficient in there. So the simple question when you say, well, we're going to save us money is too simple. And so that was part of the research. Again, I came from a computer science background. My interest was how do I capture space efficiently, how do I capture energy efficiently without stepping back saying, why do we want to do this? And part of the joy of a PhD is that you keep getting these questions and you're like, well, I don't know, let me go find out. And you keep doing that until you get to a point where you say, well, I think I've reached a point where there's no consensus here. So maybe it's worthwhile to study this part first before we even go down all the way and saying, well, what are the right tools for measuring buildings? Yeah. It's cool that you bring up how the different people have different ways of perceiving the way that they are energy efficient. Some people, like you said, get a plaque. Some people tell their employees. Some people tell their customers. Some people want to potentially build the next generation of gardens on the rooftops, solar panels on the rooftops, complete water recycling systems, all this kind of crazy things and composting the food in the garden, all this crazy stuff that is fascinating and that could potentially, but yeah, how do you measure it for all the variables? This is really good stuff. Okay. When you're doing that and then you're finding yourself moving, you're still doing work with Graeber while you're finishing up the PhD and coming back to Boston. Sure. Yeah? So, of course, the Graeber, the business continued. And one of the things we did during that time was quite asking ourselves again, how do people want to use our software, right? We talked about the desktop user really being sort of somebody who spends a lot of time with CAD, but realizing that it actually is CAD to some degrees is also a communication tool, right? Same as documents are a communication tool. And how do we make that, again, available to more people in an organization? And so, with the arrival of iOS and Android, we then brought on, we bought new mobile CAD systems onto those devices again. So somebody who's out in the construction site or somebody who's on the shop, shop floor can take the designs with them. And then we, actually, another COFIS conversation a couple of years ago led to us working on a full cloud-based CAD system, right? And again, the main driver for that is necessarily say, cool, we can do it. It's more about, well, how do we access that user who's not going to install that, you know, big install of CAD software, get licensing and all that setup? You know, how can I share a design with you so you can comment on it, that you can review and give me feedback on without me having to set up something very complicated, right? And sending out a PDF serves that to some degree, but I have no way of getting that back if I don't want you to give that to you anymore. I have no, I have very little control of the experience you're going to have while you're viewing that. And so those are the things we can, you know, I was part of, you know, moving that forward even during the PhD, but of course in a much reduced role as that was really my focus. And then what have you been seeing then in CAD and in building, surveying over the last, or has it been 10 years since the PhD? I finished 2015 or 2016, so recently, a couple of years. Three years, yeah, yeah, since PhD. So what has it been like in the last, you know, three years when you've been doing some of the, some more of the building surveying and CAD at the cutting edge, what have you been seeing? So CAD, you know, is quite diversified in what kind of tools we're using. So AAC, computer-aided design versus mechanical versus sort of what we traditionally do, which is sort of, you know, we call it 2D CAD but it's actually 2D and 3D, but they're all slightly different paradigms and we do see a lot of that growing together, right? And, you know, you see more and more design happening in tools like Revit, SolidWorks, sort of to name this two leading products, but there's still a need to communicate again. So all type of tools which are drawing, really drawing tools to have that as a documentation and legal contract and also communication tool can continuously be relevant but it becomes more and more relevant to be able to consume and work without other content. You were teaching me about this earlier just that all of these platforms have their own exporting, their own system. They all have their own formats. They all sort of traditionally have proprietary file formats but there's a bigger push by the users to say, hey, we've got to figure out how to collaborate here and get the different functions of a business to work together. And so I think it's quite an interesting time. We've had, you know, this cloud shift now happening for the last five years and this used to be a leading industry. It's sort of a little bit more laggard simply because of the large install base of the sort of traditional desktop applications. But we're trying to also enable some of our partners who currently are finding it a little bit hard to kind of move to the cloud and mobile with our tools to make that a little bit easier because we do believe in the potential for enhanced capabilities there. Yeah, yeah. So, okay, so assisting some of your clients to make the transition to cloud and then is there also a, is there a specific CAD tool that you find maximizes collaborative capability? Well, I don't want to, so there's obviously everybody's trying to solve that problem in some way or form, right? Traditionally, if you look at the mechanical CAD space, you know, you use something like the PDM systems of the world where, you know, all the data would be managed in one place, but only one person could check out that data at one point and work with that, right? That's inherently limiting because if you and I want to make changes to the same part, it's not possible, right? And there was a lot of pain points there and we're seeing more and more systems now move towards sort of a more data-based type approach where everybody can make changes and they all flow together into one sort of master repository. And it's more in the mechanical space today, excuse me, and less in the AC spaces, but I see it there also coming now. So those sort of common data environments where people all publish their data together. And I think that fundamentally changes the collaboration game because now I'm no longer limited by, you know, single access. We can all access together. Our solutions, for example, today already include abilities to share view-only links that, you know, not only give you access to design, but they also are live. So whatever, if I make a change, even after I've shared the design with you, you'll see the live version right away. And I think that's super powerful just to ease, never having to worry about, am I looking at the latest, and I think it's just, it gets enabled by cloud mostly, just the idea that you no longer passing on files, you basically have a central repository, and we're all looking at the same truth. Yeah, yeah. Interesting, the central repository seems to be one of the main ways to make sure that the collaboration is always at the final, that you're always collaborating on the final product, on the edge. And then what about with building serving on that side of things? So building serving for us, I think the main changes now, it used to be that, you know, we would go out, or our clients would go out, we really focused on selling that software. We'd go out and create a DWG, so a classic drawing file. What we're seeing difference now, in the kitchen serving market, they don't care about that, they want the kitchen design to come back to the software they're using. So the DWG is sort of a nice intermediate, but they really care about, okay, what does it mean, what kind of cabinet do you need, what size, right? And we're finding that now with the sort of prevalence of BIM and 3D tools in the AAC space, more and more clients want to say, we need the BIM model so that we can provide our potential tenants or potential buyers a 3D virtual walkthrough environment. And so the needs have changed and this is a major part of potential like virtual and augmented reality experiences, these walkthroughs and the building environments. So that seems to be a reoccurring theme from some of the clients that you work with is that they want to be able to enter into their building surveying with the tools. It really depends on what your goals are, right? I think for a professional to look at a drawing file, it's very easy to interpret, okay, this is a window, this is a door, right? Even if you're not too familiar, you kind of understand what the symbology means, but it gets very technical very quickly. Like this is like a socket or this is a lighting fixture, for example. A 3D environment is richer in that it actually makes it extremely obvious how to navigate the space and what the symbols mean because it's just a much closer representation of our real world, right? And so depending on who your audience is, like if you say I want to use sort of giving a potential tenant just a floor plan, I'm going to give them a 3D model that they can spin, they can slice, they can look at. It gives them much better sense, okay, what is the scale of these properties. If you do a mashup with one of the furniture vendors and say, well, how would that look if I put a bat in here, right? And so they are just sort of without that it's really hard to do virtual reality and augmented reality, but if you have that you can then give people a way to experience the space in a much more complete way that with a 2D design it's just so much interpretive there that it's hard to do that. What are you most looking forward to engineering software converging and moving towards? I think on the engineering side I would say that we've seen some first developments with Onshape and Fusion C60 and other cloud-based mechanical CAD systems that they're starting to unlock some of those collaborative and other features through the cloud and I think it's just such a key turning thing you can do to change what kind of software you can architect that I think we're going to see in the next 5 to 10 years many more solutions just jumping on that and then finally unlocking some of the capabilities some of the very obvious things is rendering and simulation because that's a very easy thing to parallelize and send out but a lot of the core design solutions are still desktop single user single threading even working and those solutions will hopefully get modernized and I think that will lead to another level of productivity we talked at this conference a lot about generative design that's sort of a more advanced design mechanism that's only really possible through working with the cloud and having sort of a very highly scalable computational resource at your disposal yeah and hopefully that gets democratized to more people around the world it's definitely looking like it's going in that direction yes or no right yes as in it's now accessible like you don't no longer have to build your own data center but also in a way no because now the quality of the design really depends to some degree on how much you're willing to spend on the compute for it oh yeah sure sure there's that side of it too so yes I think overall the trend is definitely positive and obviously compute gets ever cheaper and ever more affordable but it's no longer you know what can I come up with but how much am I willing to spend on it that has been a trend of the rise of civilization that the more money that you can sometimes spend on something the higher of a quality that that product can be that then can go out into the market and make more to make you more money and then last question is what would you say is an important skill for kids and their parents to develop in the 21st century what is an important skill I found what has been sort of my driver at least I'm not sure about that translate but it's really been a curiosity for technology how does it work and you know I was always trying to play around with these things and exposing myself continue to expose myself to new software and also machinery just to really be sort of flexible and being able to you know be comfortable in all of those things and I found this is also a way even now as you say you're starting points for 18 years now in this business it's a way to keep fresh and even beyond being a child like how do you how does it still be interesting by trying to do new things all the time trying to keep it fresh and I think it comes natural to I think nearly all kids is to wonder about the world and you know just let them let them try things out you heard it here first keep it fresh I love it, this has been a lot of fun thanks for coming on the show Robert really appreciate it, it's been really enlightening there's a lot to still learn and unpack check out the links below for Robert's work also check out the links below to Kofes also give us your thoughts in the comments below we'd love to hear from you about what we talked about in this conversation go share it with other people as well support the artists and entrepreneurs that you believe in you can find all of Simulations links below and go and build the future everyone manifest your dreams into the world thank you so much for tuning in and we will see you soon peace