A new tool smooths collaboration for design feasibility

There is no shortage of new digital products that come onto the market promising to reshape and streamline the workflow of construction projects. In that competitive—and, occasionally, fanciful—world, successful introductions often hinge on proving themselves in an untapped niche, or at least one that’s being inadequately served.

One such striver is Arcol, a four-year-old startup company with offices in New York and San Francisco. On June 2 Arcol officially launched its web-based collaborative platform specifically for early feasibility stages of design.

Having raised $20 million in development financing, Arcol is now “opening up the product” to AEC firms and developers after working with testing partners that included HOK and Corgan.

Arcol’s founder and CEO Paul O’Carroll (whose previous venture was ironically named Blindfold Studios) says he wants to bring the “magic” back to a design process that, in his estimation, has been bogged down by “legacy” design tools that are still relying on email to share progress information, leading to “sloppy feedback cycles” that leave stakeholder groups out of the loop and developers less-than-fully involved.

In addition, the design process typically requires multiple digital tools—like Sketch Up, Excel, Rhino, Revit, and presentation software—to conduct feasibility studies, sometimes with different teams whose communication methods are cumbersome.

“The pain point for early-stage feasibility is updates and sending emails back and forth,” says O’Carroll. “What if we could rethink the industry where everyone is working together?”

Real-time collaboration

Arcol’s platform, explains Aaron Fife, the company’s Head of Growth, has been built for a design environment in which teams are under more pressure to perform and are often working from several locations.

To facilitate collaboration, Arcol is providing what Fife calls “a real browser-based experience,” where the project’s various design data are available from one point of access. The information is updatable, customizable; in other words: real-time collaboration, whose team members send each other links to the actual project and any changes, says Mike Buss, Arcol’s Head of Product.

Fife says that Arcol’s goal is “immediate efficiency gains,” and pointed to one firm, in South America, that was able get its employees using Arcol’s design platform within an hour. Another client, a healthcare system, upon using Arcol’s product was able to get through more design iterations and had more people working on the project’s design simultaneously, with a quicker feedback loop.

Up next: schematic design

O’Carroll says that what’s next for Arcol’s product would be the ability to design more complex things like components, multi-floor sketches, and renderings. The product’s evolution is moving it toward schematic design such as facades and early BIM. Eventually, O’Carroll foresees Arcol’s product being capable of design development and construction documentation.

He says users are most likely to be midsize-to-large AEC firms, including contractors that are bringing design in-house. And while he wouldn’t provide a timetable for when the product’s new functions might be ready, O’Carroll is confident that Arcol will strike a chord with customers for which project collaboration is not just an aspiration but a competitive necessity.