Digital Future

When you’re dealing with an audience of thousands in a live venue — and millions watching at home — you have access to a huge amount of data. Understand how to analyze that data effectively and it becomes a very powerful tool.

Through our work, we generate and process a staggering amount of information collected from millions of data points across all our projects. We use that information to gain a deeper understanding of the venues we design, as well as the changing needs and habits of the people who visit them, throughout all phases of the building’s life cycle. At its simplest, this improves our own knowledge, but it also allows us to help our clients and our partners.

When a client approaches us at the very earliest stages of a project — possibly before they even know what it is they actually need — we’re able to use our resources to analyze the facilities they already have. Based on this data, and data gathered from our other projects, we help them identify the route forward that’s most suitable for them and for their budget. We do this by anticipating several potential future opportunities for development.

At the smaller end of the scale, we might suggest simple upgrades, like enhancing premium hospitality spaces, or more significant additions, such as a new stand or a retractable roof, all the way up to complete venue-wide renovation, or even an entirely new stadium. We supply costs and timeframes for each scenario, as well as detailed data that predicts future changes in revenue and enhancements to the fan experience. This helps eliminate risk so that our clients can make decisions with confidence.

Our knowledge of the sports and entertainment sector is our most valuable asset, and our Digital Products team draws on that strength to create products that will benefit the other designers in our practice, as well as our partners and collaborators.

This might include custom programs, plug-ins for our platforms, and tools to increase the quality and efficiency of our work. Some of these new tools have had a dramatic impact. For example, we have built a new tool that lets us calculate all the 3D C-values of a 50,000-seat stadium in under a minute — something that only a few years ago would take our team about three days.

The sheer size and complexity of our projects means that we have to constantly push the boundaries of what industry-standard software can do, as well as improving the efficiency of standard delivery methodologies so that they work at the scales we require. To do this, we’re constantly developing innovative new tools and workflows for ourselves and for our partners.

During the design and delivery of Kai Tak Sports Park, an enormous project covering a 28-hectare site in Hong Kong, we worked with hundreds of consultants and partners to develop a brand new methodology of BIM management for large projects. We were able to combine all the BIM models used by our collaborators — a staggering 800+ models — into a single model. This has streamlined the delivery process and drastically improved the efficiency of our collaborative workflows.