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*Winner - Best Tech Podcast - 2025 Quill Podcast Awards*
British Columbia is experiencing an unprecedented housing crisis. While addressing various aspects of the housing supply chain is essential, no single approach can fully solve the challenges we face in scaling housing production. So, what's the blueprint for growth?
In November 2023, DIGITAL — Canada's Global Innovation Cluster for digital technologies — launched its Housing Growth Innovation Program with support from the Province of British Columbia through the Ministry of Housing and Municipal Affairs. The program brings together collaborative teams of industry leaders to accelerate technology-driven approaches that are driving real, tangible growth for British Columbia's housing production sector.
Amy Vilis, Director of Housing Growth Innovation at DIGITAL, chats with innovators doing groundbreaking work within DIGITAL's Housing Growth Innovation Program to develop and implement technology-based solutions within British Columbia's housing sector across the full scale of end-to-end production. These conversations showcase how ideas are making it into the real world where they can become comprehensive, viable and, best of all, achievable solutions to accelerate housing production for British Columbians.
Amy Villis (00:01.484)
Innovation in housing isn't just about new buildings. It's about making the whole process from design to delivery, clear, adaptable and built for the future. Welcome to Blueprint for Growth Innovation in Housing. I'm Amy Villas, Director of Housing Growth Innovation at Digital, Canada's global innovation cluster for digital technologies. In British Columbia, the province's building permit hub is working towards this vision.
Developing a digital gateway to streamline how people access building requirements and connect regulators for faster, simpler approvals. By advancing efforts to standardize permitting and build tools that enable upfront compliance checks, the hub aims to make the process easier for both builders and authorities. In this episode, we'll hear about a platform that will soon connect to this digital gateway. Housing demand in BC is at an all-time high. That's why BC has created DASH.
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Digitally accelerated standardized housing. A made in BC open source platform that helps housing professionals get homes designed, approved and built faster. provides standard permit ready design. Parts made in a factory and assembled on site. with local governments and industry partners, Dash can create quality, sustainable housing faster to meet needs. Dash, digitally accelerated standardized housing.
community.
Amy Villis (01:17.41)
Development for it is already well underway with the platform designed to unite the full housing ecosystem through a connected digital framework. Built on shared standards that link open source designs, permit ready digital models, streamlined permitting and digital twins for long-term housing management. DASH shows how next generation innovation is being built through collaboration, creating a scalable data-driven foundation for faster, fairer and more inclusive housing across Canada.
First up is Esther DeVos, Executive Director of Research at BC Housing, who helped shape Dash. She demonstrates how standardized tools and permit-ready workflows make housing delivery faster and bring digital tool equity to every corner of the province. Next, I'll speak with Frank Moret, architect and partner at Alieva. He'll take us inside Dash's digital engine, showing how open standards and shared data environments create a single source of truth, enabling real collaboration, resilient asset management, and a smarter, more efficient sector for everyone.
Esther DeVos is the executive director of research at BC Housing, bringing more than 15 years of experience in public policy and service delivery. Her background spans both the justice and social housing systems where she has worked on everything from frontline operations to strategic policy design. If you could lean into maybe providing an overview of DASH including the definition of what DASH is, that would be great.
Esther DeVos
So DASH stands for the digitally accelerated standardized housing. And it's a platform that has a number of tools that enables you to use standardized designs that are permit ready, be able to design your building in a 3D model and optimize the parcel of land that you're using with being able to be guided by zoning and land use bylaws that are uploaded into that tool and then transforming that design into sort of a kit of parts in terms of a list of the components that would be manufactured offsite with modern methods of construction.
Amy Villis
Love it. Yeah, it's like the full meal deal.
Esther DeVos
It weaves everything together. So there's been a lot of activity on standardized designs, a lot of focus on the approval process for development permits for municipalities. And then also a lot of focus, especially now with Build Canada Homes on modern methods of construction. What this tool does is bring them all together in a workflow that people can go through to really optimize all the way through that process.
They don't have to go through the whole workflow. They can use parts of it or they can use the whole thing. But at the end of the day, the idea is to make housing more efficient to design and build.
Amy Villis
What are the key stages that Dash is exploring within that identification of a site permitting and the construction side? Where do you see the digital tools and the standard processes having the biggest impact?
Esther DeVos (04:23.064)
Sure. So from my very non-technical view, the advantage and what we're hearing from different professionals across the industry is that the first part of the workflow, is the creation of your design and the standardized designs, there is an underpinning with the first sort of tool that you work off of that has the land use zoning rules embedded into that. As you design, you can get real-time feedback on how your design is going to be compliant or not. And the efficiency there, because this is not replacing architects and engineers, they're still very much needed as part of this process, but it reduces the amount of niggly work or tweaking work that they need to do. something that would take them about a week to do takes them a couple of minutes because the system is able to just go through all the calculations and give them the feedback as they do the design. So they can really focus on the fun part of designing and make the building look in a particular way with their vision and with the computer sort of addressing all of the more boring parts of the work. That's how I understand it as someone who's not an architect. And then the other piece that is really integral to the workflow is building information modeling, which is otherwise known as BIM. And that's the technology that allows you to sort of take a design and create it in a 3D digital twin approach. And what that does, it allows you to have everyone sort of come together that's involved in building that building earlier on. And what we've seen through use of BIM and other projects is actually a decrease in change orders down the road because people are able to work out some of the challenges in design and other components earlier into the process before things are on site. And so you don't have to do all of the changes once things are underway and worry about timelines for different crews and traits and things like that. And then the last part, but it's also really critical, is taking that digital design and transforming that into essentially a manufacturing list. And so working with manufacturers to have an open source, panelized approach. So if you're thinking about offsite manufacturing, we normally think about those big boxes that people crane in. You can do that, but also what we're talking about is sort of more of a Lego or IKEA approach where you're doing flat packs and you're able to truck those in wall panel after wall panel and they all fit together. Essentially, that's the standardized piece. It can also be standard regardless of who's manufacturing it. So it allows for economies of scale in a different way and for the industry to be or largely used because you're not tapping into one particular form of build.
Amy Villis
Excellent, I love that. And that leads me into my next question, which is the value of modern methods of construction, or we call it MMC, and prefabrication. So, Datch is really taking an approach where that is the preferred method of kit of parts. What have been some of early insights and lessons as you work with some of your partners and suppliers?
Esther DeVos
One of the things that we've seen, we know that there is challenges with supply chain and labor shortages, and especially the amount of technical labor that's now required for construction. Modern methods of construction allow you to address that in a different way, and also can provide a longer sort of work time for people in construction because they're not having to climb as much every day that they do work.
They're also able to be inside for the most part. so you're also, especially in other parts of Canada, other than the lower mainland, where you have winter and super cold temperatures, that you're able to still do your construction and get your pieces done in a warm climate inside a factory. And then we can also locate where these suppliers are so that there's a reduction of greenhouse gases and other environmental costs, less waste, those kinds of things. So there's some real efficiencies and benefits to doing modern methods of construction and other countries. This is certainly where people are going as well. And so it's really exciting to be on the cusp of it here in Canada and see the industry grow alongside.
Amy Villis
BIM technologies being incorporated, those are pretty big game changers. And I know that BIM's been around for 20 plus years and we're all looking for opportunities to implement it. How are you seeing their role of those regulatory ready and BIM templates improving collaboration, speeding up approvals and reducing the risk of these type of builds?
So this is where the work that we're doing with Dash really complements the work that the government of British Columbia has been doing in digitizing things like the building code and working with municipalities on Permit Hub to really move the permit and development approval process to be more computer and digitized friendly as well. So this matches up with that effort. And so when you have standardized designs, you can then have it go through the computer process and if it's standard and all of the lines are recognized, it then can just be an approval from a computer and then it allows the people who are working on the approval process to really focus on just the pieces that are needing to be custom, not the entire plan itself. We're really looking at cutting down on the approval timelines for municipalities, assuming they have the digital means on their end.
But even if they don't, a person can recognize that these are permit-ready standardized designs and know that they are in alignment with their bylaws and their other land use planning requirements. Same thing with utilities. We're now working on what are the requirements from a regulatory perspective from the utility companies. Combined, we're looking at really reducing that time lag that is involved in those development improvements.
Amy Villis (10:33.454)
Yeah, that's great. How do you see Dash connecting in with the province's building permit hub? What's sort of being done to make sure that the digital tools, designs, data workflow will be able to speak to each other across different jurisdictions and regions?
Esther DeVos
So we're working very closely with our colleagues over at the Ministry of Housing and Municipal Affairs in lockstep so that there is absolutely a tie-in, so that there's not even a question that it won't work with each other. And also coordinating on BIM endeavors and the whole digitization of the code. Really, they are strong partners with us in Dash, just as much as everybody else.
The idea is that the work they're doing will help prepare municipalities to align with what is needed for DASH. And I see this really as a win, not just for the people who are building housing, but also for municipalities who have received quite a lot of attention lately about development approval timelines. So if they're working towards Permit Hub and sort of elevating what they're doing in that respect and getting the support of the province on that front, then this will be a complimentary process for them and for building housing in their respective communities.
I think yes, there's delays in permitting. I won't deny that those exist. They exist in certain areas, in certain regions, but for some local governments, it's just not having the horsepower with the volume of building inspectors that they have in order to meet those inspection requirements. So getting those really good designs, those ability to evaluate and look at compliance in advance, they don't have speed issues with their permitting, but what they'll have is more certainty and reduced risk around
Amy Villis (12:20.962)
when it comes time for building inspections. So I love the concept and the intention and narrative of how Dash has been made to support various actors and local governments, whether you're on the development side or an architect, or you're sitting in a local government with just 10,000 constituents. It's different. We're not always trying to fit a Vancouver solution into the narrative.
Esther DeVos
That's really true. mean, we worked right from the beginning. We had partnership with Metro Vancouver and a wide variety of members from Metro Vancouver of very different sizes. So that was very much at the forefront of our minds as we move forward that this can't just be a good solution for large cities. It has to work no matter where you are in the province and whatever is the challenge that you face as a municipality to be able to affect greater efficiencies for building and especially with modern methods of construction.
Amy Villis
So Dash really brings together so many themes. We've talked about this actually across the whole season of this podcast around harmonized data, tools, policy, all kind of pulling together that idea of housing delivery faster, smarter, and more adaptable for different regions, different local governments, and the people that live here. So what do you think some of the biggest takeaways that you're already experiencing as you build out Dash?
Esther DeVos (14:13.57)
There's a lot of excitement over the promise of Dash being designed in the way that it was, just in terms of how we have woven together all of the different pieces with advice from the different professions. And I think that has really gone a long way to legitimize Dash because we have rooted it very much so in the expertise of the people who have come before us and gotten us to this point, but also have given us great advice on this journey. And so a big shout out to all of our partners in that regard and a big thank you to CMHC for their seed funding to get us to where we are now.
And one of the most beautiful things that I heard the other day with the Building Permit Hub and access to tools is we're looking at tool equity. know, the big guys don't just get to have, write the checks to get POCs and different providers to give them tools and to implement them. It's this concept of tool equity where we'll be able to offer that through the platform, the use of Dash and the Building Permit Hub around smaller local governments that don't have access to big paychecks.
We're doing a bit of that with the design equity as well. So the designs are going to be open source. The intellectual property of them are in the public commons. You still need an architect and engineers to sign off on the final designs, but you're not having to do the first run of designs. It's a matter of just pulling them from the catalog. And as we grow the catalog or people choose to download their designs in the catalog, then we'll just have that much more choice.
Amy Villis
So how repeatable and scalable is Dash as a Canadian solution? I'm very, very proud of BC leading initiatives like this and BC Housing taking the lead on this. And yes, CMHC seeing the foresight of giving some original dollars towards it. But where do you see the repeatability and scalability of Dash across our country?
Esther DeVos
That was always part of the plan because of the national funding that we received from CMHC. BC can sort of be that leader that it normally holds that position. When it comes to housing and innovation, then we can try out some of the bugs first here with people who have been with us along the whole journey. Definitely repeatable and scalable. We may be looking at slightly different designs. But there's work underway to also look at harmonizing building codes. We'll have to account for different seismic requirements and different climate requirements. Everyone is also working on the same problems at the same time. And so I think what this is allowing us to do is really sort of join together as like a national front and looking at DASH and how it can be pulled across the country and used to really help every jurisdiction with addressing their housing challenges in a good way and while still allowing for that variability and that flexibility within each jurisdiction based on either their building code or their land use rules or even just their needs.
Amy Villis
Esther shows how modular designs and standardized workflows are opening housing innovation to more communities. Our next guest will take us inside the digital engine that makes it all work. Frank Murackt is an architect and digital innovation expert with more than two decades of experience across architecture, information management, and construction technology. Now a partner at Alieva, Frank helps organizations bring BIM and integrated digital workflows to life in a practical, human-centric way.
His work shows how technology can make complex projects seem simpler, helping architects, engineers and builders collaborate more efficiently across every stage of housing delivery. You're bringing the D to Dash. So on the digital side of things, if you would like to just start this conversation with telling me about what BIM is, that would be great.
Frank Muract
So BIM actually, you know, BIM stands for Building Information Modeling. And very often people understand that as the tools, you know, the technological aspect, but it's not just that. It's a collaborative process. We will work with different tools, but it's just means and methods to better manage our information in a global picture, you know? So the main goal is to make the entire process easier and more efficient by installation reliable, consistent, shared data through the whole team. So we are trying to leverage all the information that we can have in a model and make that enrich the development of the project for every stakeholder.
So it's like creating those layers. BIM is a big part of Dash. How are you approaching the idea of building a single source of truth as far as moving that best practices around the data and the information that's being shared?
Amy Villis
So first, being January, people think about billing information, modeling. So of course there's models involved, but it's not just that. The single source of truth, you have to think that more as a common data environment. It's informational ecosystem where every information should be well managed, well structured, and of course useful for relevant, useful for every stakeholder.
It's how you're basically managing that full digital workflow from the modeling and the engagement of the various stakeholders, how they're allowed to play in this digital environment and where they participate within the workflow. So maybe you could speak a little bit about the full digital workflow and what it might look like from early design concepts through to manufacturing assembly. And then one of the big things I find is the asset management. We don't always talk about how valuable having that information is on the operation management side of buildings. So maybe if you could speak to that and if there are any digital standards that really pay off in there, that would be super helpful.
Frank Muract (19:53.134)
Dash is an ongoing process and work, we are focusing right now more on the design phase and construction phase, but we will add different elements and different requirements to improve the way we will operate the building after that, but we have to do that progressively because big important part of the whole process is the adoption by the industry. And we have to respect the level of maturity of the industry. We want to innovate, but we also have to be very cautious about where the industry is to be sure that we can adopt that in a more broader way. Otherwise, we may be aiming for too high objective and at the end, we won't have a good response from the industry. So this is why we are doing that very progressively and we're focusing right now on the design phase and construction phase and we're adding the few elements through the different projects to be able to manage that package of information that will be useful for the operational phase and to structure that in a good way because otherwise from my experience when it's too demanding you don't have the level of quality that you asked for. The first aspect of the process that we're working on with the Dash workflow, so the first step of the workflow is to work with the site. So we will use different tools like ArchyStore to be able to iterate very quickly on a site, so to access a site depending on the rules and bylaws of that site and with pre-approved layouts that are code compliant. So like that, we can very easily assess a site to understand if a project is feasible and if it's feasible, which kind of layout is better on that site. After that, when we have a site and maybe a general matching for the building, we will offer customizable dash blueprints. So these are buildings that are already modeled with kit of parts and that will help people, designers to understand what is feasible, what is doable with Dash 10.0 and that are compliant. And they will work with that so they don't have to start from scratch. They can already use a strong foundation to design quicker and also to be sure that they will be compliant at the end. In those blueprints, you have like multiple suit sizes, for example, and configuration that you can use. And after that, we can also develop the fabrication aspect with using different platforms, like for example, Cope, that can help us to iterate on how we can prefabricate our walls, our external walls or interior walls. So based on the model the designer developed, we can upload that in platform and you will be able to iterate.
Obviously we talk about BIM adoption and I respect the fact that the sector will only move as fast as the sector wants to and the value of the use of BIM has not been proven. For a large portion, the 24,000 small construction folks in BC, partially because of cost and understanding on how it can be harnessed and used. On that adoption or lack thereof of adoption or the readiness of adoption.
Amy Villis
What would you indicate or what would you say to the sector as far as how there are opportunities to find affordable tools that will allow you a full end-to-end housing production digital value of the use of BIM?
Frank Muract
So first, yeah, of course we respect the maturity of the industry, but we are also, you know, trying to push the industry, but just little by little to be able to transform the industry. But in a way that is acceptable and that people can understand why they should do that and, it's feasible, so we can do that. This is one of the biggest issue. We're always trying to explain the benefits of being with the bigger picture, you know, because it's better for everyone, but when you're a designer, when you have your own firm and you have to pay for formation, for training, you pay for the tool, you really have to focus on what need for me, for your company. And this is a lever that we use a lot when we're trying to implement BIM in the industry, because we can just benefit from the full potential of BIM when every stakeholders will have some benefits for themselves. The cost of the tools, you have to understand that it's an investment, a way to improve and optimize your way of working in your company. And this is the reason why it's very important when you're defining BIM requirements on a project like Dash or any other project to understand what you can ask for to be sure that at the end you will have the deliverable that you need, but also what is feasible for the different stakeholders.
So you have to respect that and to ask the right amount of information at the right moment. If you do that, people will understand why they should implement BIM in their own company, in their own organization, because they can work more efficiently, they can be more effective, they can develop maybe a new market. So it's really important to focus on those aspects biggest opportunity is to better work together with the BIM models, you know, because it will improve the transparency and you can have a collective comprehension on the project. Everyone will work together to find optimized solutions to that. I think this is the biggest opportunity. Of course, with different tools, you can deep dive in your data, for example, so you can extract some information, can extrapolate on information because it's not always useful to model everything in project. for a project or for an initiative like Dash, know, with that repeatability in mind, with standardized objects, it's an opportunity maybe sometimes to have less objects in a model because you know that this is a kid of parts, but you can be more efficient in your modelization. You have to understand the goal you have in mind to keep that in mind, to use it the proper way and to really add value at the end. In order to do that, we have to share different information. We have to use tools in common. We have also to think all the technical aspects like interoperability. So open standards are very useful for that. Of course, they are very useful because this is sometimes the only way that you can share your work with another stakeholder that if that stakeholder don't work with the same tool as you.
So open standards are useful for that. So you have to think all the technological aspect to be sure that you create that foundation that can allow that collaboration to emerge. And this is the way that we can have at the end better results. Exactly. mean, we hear about it quite often when you look at the end to end production and you have someone sitting in a BIM readable file, say it's in Revit and it gets kicked to one of the subs, they kick it out and flatten it and put it in their own proprietary. And so it's like a string of APIs and ways of getting around that.
Many companies are not really aware of that because when they work with the same software, they really want to use that software at the maximum and to take profit of just exchanging the same file format. A fight or struggle you have to have with people in the industry because they don't want to have the trouble using open standards. So they're pushing companies to change their tools just to be able to work with them. And it shouldn't be like that.
Amy Villis (28:08.664)
Looking ahead, where do you see BIM and digital delivery heading? Things like digital handovers, like our digital twin experiences, the internet of things, integration, life cycle data management.
Frank Muract
Of course, the real potential of Beam goes far beyond just the design and construction phase. It lies in our ability to leverage the digital deliverable itself, because the data is useful to create the physical asset, but the data itself is an asset. And we have to use that at the end of the project. When project information is structured, validated, and sufficient, it becomes powerful foundation for everything that follows from operation, maintenance, to long-term asset management. With the model itself, so the geometry, we can create the foundation for digital twin. It's a digital replica of a physical asset. So in order to do that, you have to have that spatial reference. And that spatial reference is the geometry you've just done during the project. You have also a lot of information was structured, if done correctly, was structured, aggregated around that spatial reference. And with that, you can just extract information, maybe sometimes transform it, like export, transform, load, or you can use different API on other way to exchange information. You will be able to exchange that information with all the tools that are useful, digital tools in the operation and maintenance phase because it's not just ready or tools like that, being tools, every stakeholder has its own tools. With all the information you created during the project, you can use it to populate those tools and after to potentially aggregate all those different tools around that referential. When you can do that and you can have all the information aggregated around your digital replica, you can have a digital twin. So this is the digital twin. And we want that to be not just with the static information, but also with the dynamic information, like for example, temperature, airflow, things like that. So this is the potential that you can develop with using Beam in the project. It's the foundation for the potential digital twin at the end. This is for me, the biggest benefit for the operation maintenance when you're using BIM. This is how it can profit to the phase after design construction. But in a broader way also, I think that every initiative that helps promote broader, more efficient adoption of the BIM and information management is a step that helps contribute at the end to the maturity of the industry. And it also moves toward a better built environment at the end, because if the industry is better, the result is better.
Amy Villis
With the use of BIM in digital modeling, you'll be able to see that circular back of going, we've now been able to monitor a building accurately based on its design data. And now we realize we might find more efficiencies for the next generation of buildings because we now have this data. And that's where I see that evolution and getting to that better built environment, which is awesome.
Thanks so much to Esther and Frank for sharing how Dash is moving modular methods, digital design, and data-driven models. What we're seeing isn't just new technology, it's a new kind of connection. Digital tools are becoming the connective tissue that links governments, builders, and communities, turning data into decisions and ideas into homes. This podcast is powered by Digital's Housing Growth Innovation Program with support from the province of British Columbia and the Ministry of Housing and Municipal Affairs.