Date/Time: October 30, 2025 | 3:00 – 4:00 pm

Room: 155-156

Audience: Architects, Engineers, Educators, Facility Personnel, Contractors / Suppliers / Manufacturers, Consultants

Call to Action: 

1. Consider the power of combining security consulting, computational design, and architectural expertise.
2. Consider the power of being able to message to your tax base fully optimized security solutions that guarantee maximum coverage for lowest cost.
3. Consider the power of managing complex variables in a fully integrated way.

Abstract: This joint presentation between the Architect, Computational Design Expert, and District Project Manager, will take delegates through the process of how Arcadis teamed with Portland Public Schools to develop an on-budget, on-schedule solution for installing optimized camera upgrades across 80 campuses. Through a 2019 bond measure, the district allocated $19M for security camera upgrades to all of its education buildings. The core challenge was to ensure that bond dollars were spent such that each campus achieved close to 100% building perimeter coverage, while staying within budget, and allowing the allocation of funds to each school to fairly reflect the nuances of site, existing coverage, building footprint, and incident hotspots. In essence, a complex design exercise with multiple variables across 80 campuses. By working through a series of baseline options, the team developed and refined a methodology that married human skill and experience, with computational tools, to develop a demonstrably optimized solution. Our presentation will describe the process from the consultant and client perspective and demonstrate how a combined offering of typically discrete expertise created a unique, flexible algorithmic solution that can be deployed to optimize multiple scales and scenarios.

Learning Objectives:

1. Understand the methodology and approach that was developed for this project.
2. Understand how the parametric tool helped balance budgets across multiple campuses to achieve equity.
3. Understand how each variable was tracked, refined and integrated through the parametric tool.
4. Understand through exploring this project how similar approaches can be used to solve complex design and budgetary challenges.