In late summer 2020, Thornton Tomasetti announced an investment in ShapeDiver through their accelerator TTWiiN. Additionally, ShapeDiver announced a merger with Swarm, a Grasshopper-based app store for the design community developed by the Core Studio at TT. The main goal was to create a combined product that could offer enough flexibility to empower parametric designers from any industry.

This is a brief behind-the-scenes of what led to these actions to take place. We sat down with Robert Otani and Benjamin Howes from Thornton Tomasetti to go over the main objectives behind their investment and merger with ShapeDiver.

About Thornton Tomasetti

Thornton Tomasetti is a multidisciplinary, 1,400 person scientific and engineering consulting firm that has brought 65,000+ projects to life in more than 135 countries. 

The firm optimizes the design and performance of structures, materials, and systems for projects of every level of size and complexity.

Notable projects include JFK Terminal One, Park Imperial Condominium, American Airlines Arena, VIA West 57th, Cornell University Gates Hall,  Jeddah Tower, The Shed,

“Thornton Tomasetti has always had a commitment in its culture to push our industry into the future,” says Robert Otani.

Robert K. Otani, PE LEED AP is chief technology officer (CTO) at the firm. He oversees an innovation arm at the company called  CORE studio, an applications development, advanced computational modeling, and R&D group at his firm.

Robert leads Thornton Tomasetti’s firm-wide Research and Development initiative called CORE Lab and the firm Liaison with TTWiiN Inc., an independent entity created by Thornton Tomasetti focused on driving innovation to commercialization of products.  

He has extensive structural design and project management experience involving commercial, infrastructure, institutional, cultural and residential structures on projects totaling over $2 billion USD of construction.  He has served as President of the Structural Engineers Association of New York in 2007 and has been an Adjunct Professor at Pratt Institute School of Architecture from 2008 to 2018 and Columbia Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation from 2009- to 2015.

“Parametric thinking allows us to conceptualize any design challenge as a malleable system, which in turn helps us iterate a lot more rapidly and offers a wealth of context for making informed decisions.” he continues.

“A traditional design approach is also inherently iterative, however its manual nature puts a practical limit on how many potential options one can produce and evaluate, which means that an optimal answer can easily be overlooked. Parametric tools like Grasshopper remove this constraint by allowing you to quickly generate a gradient of potential solutions where various aspects of a project can be balanced against one another.”

The challenge with parametric thinking is that innovations, and tough-to-create Grasshopper files in particular, are often only used once and then discarded. In other words, tools developed during complex projects are not reused for other projects.

The goal of CORE studio is to democratize information, resources, and knowledge across the global parametric design community — to gain more utility from otherwise one-and-done parametric designs. The idea is that designers can work collaboratively and share resources to solve problems instead of creating solutions in siloes.

“What used to take probably months of coding and software development time now takes days to implement,” says Benjamin Howes. “We can make progress, way faster, with a pool of people collaborating in this way.”

Benjamin W. Howes is a Vice President at the firm, and is the Director of Application Development for CORE studio.  He oversees software applications design and product development, leading a global team of 12+ full-time computational designers, web developers, and application engineers.

Benjamin has specialized computational design, software development, and creative direction experience focused on developing novel computational solutions to contemporary design and engineering problems. He received a Bachelor's degree in Architecture from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, N.Y. and a Master's degree in Product Architecture and Engineering from Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, N.J. Currently, he is teaching a course called “Parametrics” at Pratt Institute that introduces graduate students to parametric modeling and computational design in Grasshopper.

In this course he goes in depth of how parametric design is causing a paradigm shift in the way we approach Architecture and how we can use modern softwares to integrate this design philosophy to the future of AEC.

About Swarm

Enter Swarm, a platform that CORE Studio created, which enables engineers to share computational designs with one another.

The idea for Swarm emerged from a hackathon that the CORE team hosted as an educational and team-building event. Three Thornton Tomasetti engineers demonstrated that it was possible to share a 3D Grasshopper definition with others in a web environment.

The main concept was for computational designers to upload their existing Grasshopper scripts to an online platform. This way, other designers could have access to useful tools, rather than trying to create Grasshopper files from scratch to solve the same problems across multiple projects.

As Swarm grew into its own platform, CORE Studio began to draft the next big step to propel this technology forward.

The Beginning Of The Future

In late 2019, ShapeDiver and CORE studio had a virtual meeting to discuss both ShapeDiver and Swarm’s respective technology roadmaps and soon after serendipitously realized that much of their technology roadmaps overlapped.

“Swarm’s roadmap included a more robust and scalable enterprise solution which ShapeDiver already had in production, and ShapeDiver’s roadmap included integrations with popular AEC software like Revit and Illustrator, which Swarm already had built out,” says Otani.

Those conversations resulted in a merger in 2020, which led to ShapeDiver absorbing the Swarm platform. With that merger, Thornton Tomasetti became an investor in ShapeDiver. Together, ShapeDiver and Swarm will offer the largest and most powerful cloud-native, Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) platform for building applications based on parametric models.

“We saw an opportunity to commercialize Swarm, spin-off a company based on an alpha product, gain access to ShapeDiver’s library, and accelerate a global movement in computational design,” says Otani.

The Vision

That unified solution is an enterprise-ready platform with access to ready-built Grasshopper and parametric design workflows. This foundation opens doors for ShapeDiver to become a marketplace where designers can share and monetize their work. 

Swarm and ShapeDiver make it possible to create many apps quickly — thereby accelerating the pace at which knowledge and resources get shared across companies that rely on computational design solutions.

“ShapeDiver has a mature product and software with a growing user base,” says Otani. “We had a lot of integrations with engineering, architectural, and design software that made sense to add to the ShapeDiver platform. Together, we have a much more robust solution.”

“The pool of people who can develop solutions in Grasshopper is way bigger than the people who rely on traditional scripting methods,” explains Howes. “That’s one huge gain. The other is that the collaboration will empower all of us to build solutions faster.”

The shared goal between the two partners is to democratize computational design knowledge across industries and organization types. This capability makes it easier for companies to build solutions to some of the most pressing sustainability and public health challenges that the world is navigating.

“At the moment, our development team is working closely with ShapeDiver to bring the massive potential of cloud computing to the Grasshopper’s desktop users,” says Otani. 

“Our goal is to integrate ShapeDiver with design tools and desktop software commonly used by many professionals across various industries. Grasshopper as an implementation of the parametric design philosophy exists only within the Rhino ecosystem, but the need for parametric workflows is a common thread connecting all design fields. Being able to use ShapeDiver inside the software of your choice means letting non-Rhino users tap into the game-changing possibilities of parametric design.”

“The sky’s the limit for what can be built,” says Otani.