The Hawaiʻi School Facilities Authority is rolling out a new digital planning platform built with San Francisco-based firm MKThink, an "Akamai" configurator that state leaders say could shave months off design schedules and help trim construction costs, as per Honolulu Star-Advertiser.
How Big Hawaii’s Classroom Crunch Really Is
State leaders are not sugarcoating the backlog. Roughly 1,800 portable classrooms are still in use across the islands, a number the Honolulu Star-Advertiser reported is roughly equal to 61 elementary schools worth of space. The SFA and Department of Education together oversee about 4,500 structures, representing millions of square feet of public school facilities.
Traditional pre-design work alone can take six to 18 months, and complete capital projects sometimes stretch past the five-year mark. A 2017 estimate put the price tag to replace 500 to 600 end-of-life school buildings at about 1.3 billion dollars, a snapshot of the deferred maintenance problem and the cost of moving away from temporary classrooms, as outlined to the Honolulu Star-Advertiser.
SFA’s Push And Early Wins
The SFA was created to standardize designs, streamline approvals and speed up delivery of school projects. On its priority list: new preschool capacity, a Central Maui school and teacher workforce housing. Officials are quick to point to one example they say shows what is possible if processes are tightened.
In a Ready Keiki renovation, the Lieutenant Governor’s office says the SFA completed a preschool project in seven weeks and under budget, a turnaround time that would make most capital planners do a double take (Office of the Lieutenant Governor). The authority’s public materials highlight a strategy built around standard designs, prefabrication and data-informed planning as tools to shorten delivery windows across the system (Hawaiʻi School Facilities Authority).
Inside The ‘Akamai’ Configurator
To tackle the front end of projects, SFA officials told the Honolulu Star-Advertiser they are deploying a cloud-based configurator that plugs into Revit and other file systems. The tool is designed to automatically generate 3D schematic drawings, 2D plans and building specifications, and it can be expanded to cover construction documents, procurement steps and parts of the construction phase itself.
SFA Executive Director Riki Fujitani told the paper the system "can eliminate and shrink permitting and environmental assessment time," and said the configurator could cut pre-planning timelines by about 60 percent and reduce construction costs by roughly 15 percent. MKThink and SFA indicated that the first phase of the system could be in place as soon as summer 2026, with the full platform targeted for early 2027, according to the Honolulu Star-Advertiser.
Who Is Behind The Tech
MKThink, a San Francisco-based architecture and strategy firm with an Oceanic office in Honolulu, is serving as the SFA’s technology and design partner. In its public materials, the company describes its practice as operating at the intersection of design, analytics and "spatial intelligence" (MKThink).
With a physical presence in Hawaii, MKThink is positioned to work directly with the SFA on local building standards and data needs. That background aligns with the systems-integration work the authority says it needs in order to automate schematic drawings and standard specifications and to pull multiple planning steps into a single digital workflow.
What Comes Next
If the configurator delivers even part of the promised savings, it could help speed up replacements and renovations and gradually reduce the state’s reliance on portable classrooms. The tool will not, however, make the usual hurdles disappear. Projects still need funding, permits and community signoff, and Hawaii’s inventory of aging buildings means any technology will be working against a sizable backlog.
SFA leaders describe the configurator as one piece of a broader strategy to deliver schools faster and at scale, not a magic fix. The goal is to combine standardized, data-driven design with steady capital so that yearslong timelines start to look a lot more like the seven-week Ready Keiki renovation than the five-year capital slog (Hawaiʻi School Facilities Authority).
