
Last week I went to Calgary, Alberta to visit DIRTT and see for myself what DIRTTy tricks they’d been up to since I visited last year at about this time. As it usually happens when you visit DIRTT, one of the first people I encountered was co-founder and CEO, Mogens Smed. Since it was the first time I’d seen him this year, I started the conversation by congratulating him on the company’s 2015 results, clearing the $200million (Canadian $) hurdle for the first time with a remarkable 26.3% revenue growth rate over 2014. His response was, “Yes, but it should be so much more…if people just understood how much better our solutions are than building with traditional building techniques, like drywall, we’d be 3 or 4 times that size by now.” I thought the answer spoke volumes about the attitude of an entrepreneur capable of that level of success.

Personally, I haven’t met that many people who have built more than one company from start-up to over $100million in sales. I know they exist; I just haven’t met them. So talking with Mr. Smed is a real treat for me. It gives me some insight into the way of thinking that can do it. When he founded DIRTT (for ‘Doing It Right This Time’, for you industry novices) along with his partners, Geoff Gosling and Barrie Loberg, they were all veterans of highly successful companies. So doing it right this time had more to do with founding principles than clever slogans. To name a few of those founding principles, I’ll start with using technology to innovate, being as environmentally conscious as possible and building a fun, engaging corporate culture, and more. The proof of the pudding is in the eating, so I was keen to see how the company was doing given such lofty founding principles.
The software system ICE® is an important underpinning of the principle of using technology to innovate. The brainchild of co-founder, Mr. Loberg, ICE® has been internally developed as an extraordinarily user friendly front-end software tool for interior design layout, client communication through project visualization, order planning, pricing and then production planning. Apparently, one of the breakthrough innovative ideas embodied in ICE® is that it is based on computer-gaming technology rather than the more common starting point of CAD drawing programs. This difference has given it certain advantages in speed and visualization capabilities from the get-go.

For the most part, 3D visualization in the world of commercial interior design is currently 3D projection as viewed on a 2D flat screen. DIRTT has now taken its ICE 3D visualization program and added realistic outdoor elements – this is called ICEscape and Mark Rudolph and Dave Drebit of the ICE team showed me the latest release. The resolution is nearing photorealistic and a new twist is the ability to pick from among several background options for what a person would see out the window of the demoed space. Also new and very interesting given the trend to greater attention being paid to get natural daylight into the workplace is the ability to input longitude and latitude coordinates and directional orientation. Then the program simulates the sun’s travel across the sky and the resulting daylight pattern in the space throughout the day and for various seasons. Mr. Debit cautioned that the program only produces a simulation, and is not a substitute for a thorough sun study. But it is very cool to be able to quickly see approximately how daylight will penetrate various design alternatives.
The next big thing is 3D projection in virtual reality (VR) through a goggle apparatus that in the case of the Microsoft solution allows the viewer to see a holographic projection in 3D, or in other cases, such as using Oculus Rift, to perceive the view inside the goggles as the viewer’s actual surroundings. As the Oculus Rift website explains, “Rift uses state of the art displays and optics designed specifically for VR. Its high refresh rate and low-persistence display work together with its custom optics system to provide incredible visual fidelity and an immersive, wide field of view.”
On my visit last year I was outfitted with an early Oculus Rift goggle set and I walked through a VR simulation of a small office space I had helped layout and detail only moments before. While far from perfect, the experience was an order of magnitude more realistic than a typical 3D flythrough. So one of my objectives for this year’s visit was to see what progress had been made. Messrs. Rudolph and Drebit were my VR guides and after outfitting me with the Oculus Rift they welcomed me to the virtual tour of a space they’d just completed for demonstrations at Connext in Chicago, concurrent with NeoCon.
Here I must digress. DIRTT doesn’t have showrooms, as we normally do in the furniture industry, they have Green Learning Centres. And it doesn’t have showrooms because it’s in the construction industry not the furniture industry. Mr. Smed consistently makes this point to everyone and the fact that many people think of DIRTT as a furniture company is partially what drives his “…if people just understood…” comments. Anyway, the Chicago Green Learning Centre (GLC) is located at 325 N. Wells, just across the street from the Merchandise Mart. The name NeoCon® is the property of the Merchandise Mart Properties/Vornado and may not be used by anyone who isn’t a tenant of the Merchandise Mart to describe an event that is concurrent with NeoCon, so DIRTT has Connext during that period. To me, this is all part of the entrepreneurial spirit that suffuses the company – smart, witty and just a little in-your-face.
Meanwhile back at the design visualization area, I experienced some improvement in the queasiness factor (last year my brain had a hard time adjusting to the virtual environment and the net affect was a slightly unstable, queasy feeling). The rendering of the space seemed to be at a better resolution this year, but when I consider this as a tool for communicating design intent to a client the real wow factors were already in place last year. When I asked my guides about progress in rolling the technology out to the market they explained that they had been unable to actively offer the capability to anyone because Oculus and others had delayed the broad scale introduction of the hardware required for a true launch. Now that the hardware logjam has broken, I expect we will start to see DIRTT’s Distribution Partners (analogous to dealers in the furniture industry) implementing ICE VR. I believe VR will eventually save the construction and furnishings industries huge sums of time and money now spent on mock-ups and other techniques of communication to show clients what it is they’re buying – to say nothing of showing contractors the design intent and getting their input before it’s built.

In February of 2015 DIRTT signed an agreement with Corning Glass for exclusive use of its new Willow® glass. Willow is only 0.2mm (200 microns) thick and so pliable it can be rolled up like paper for shipping, storage and use in a manufacturing environment. It can be bonded to a variety of materials – acrylic, polycarbonate, steel and MDF (medium density fiber board). Ultra-thin, flexible and lightweight (30 times lighter than standard 6mm glass) it comes rolled in long spools that can hold as much as 4,000 sq. ft. of glass.
This innovation is a huge breakthrough for manufacturing back painted glass panels. The use of back painted glass in commercial interiors is not new, but recently the medium has experienced a growth spurt. Panels manufactured using Willow Glass have all the advantages of regular glass for back painted applications, such as non-ghosting dry-erase “whiteboards,” and for embedded technology such as monitors and TVs. But additionally, glass panels constructed by laminating Willow Glass to a substrate such as MDF are lighter and more durable than glass, can be shipped flat – saving shipping costs and are much easier to install. From a decorative standpoint new digital printing techniques allow the “back-printing” at an extraordinary resolution giving designers an amazing canvas for creating designs and motifs or simulating designs and motifs of nature. In the case of marble and other stone types it allows us to “…leave the marble undisturbed in the mountain;” the highest form of sustainability.


Outside the venture capital world of Silicon Valley it is rare to find a company willing and able to invest huge sums of money in a product or process that has no immediate return prospects. Three-year paybacks are the rule and 5 years are a stretch. But at DIRTT, on the strength of Mr. Smed’s belief that timber construction is inherently more sustainable than other methods, it has made a huge investment in designing and developing a whole new business around processing timber in a factory in order to facilitate prefab timber construction of buildings.
As of today there is minimal demand for such a thing, but consistent with its “build it and they will come” philosophy, DIRTT is working diligently to perfect and automate woodworking at a very innovative level – both innovative and retrograde at the same time. State of the art milling machines allow the company to process very large glue-lam “logs” to a consistent level of precision that is not possible by hand, but which uses traditional fastening and joining techniques that minimize the need for mechanical fasteners. Yep! Precision mortise and tenon joinery on giant beams!

To prove the concept Mr. Smed commissioned the design of a mezzanine needed to accommodate DIRTT’s growing staff. But rather than building it using steel and concrete, the design used traditional timber frame construction. The result is sustainable, fully functional and if you happen to see it from below, beautiful.
As I toured the timber frame facility I came across a large case on casters that had accumulated some dust. Someone had written a message in the dust (see photo) and I thought it was a perfect reflection of the attitudes I found throughout the organization. Along with their many other accomplishments, the founders of DIRTT have definitely succeeded in building a fun, engaged corporate culture.