The Innovation Design Consortium (IDC) named Acelab its co-development partner for development of the first-ever open material data standard.

Design authoring, project management and procurement have each been standardized by major software platforms, but material data and compliance have not.

Materials are roughly 40% to 50% of the construction cost of every building, and the data behind them has never had a common definition of what a material is, what describes it, and how those attributes relate.

That lack of standardization impacts project costs. Bad data was responsible for an estimated $1.85 trillion across the industry in 2020 and drove 14% of all rework, according to research from Autodesk and FMI.

The IDC includes 46 leading architecture and engineering firms and is focused on developing shared standards, tools, and partnerships across data sharing, performance and sustainability, operational efficiency, and project delivery.

“I watched this industry standardize how it models buildings,” said Dave Lemont, Executive Chairman of Acelab and former CEO of Revit. “It never standardized the materials that go into them, and materials are half the money. IDC is the first body with the scale and the mandate to fix that, because it is the largest firms themselves deciding what the standard should be.”