What Can a Computational Design Team Do For You?
Issue #04
I’m Vignesh Kaushik. I curate and write articles on Thank God It’s Computational to help architects, designers, and urban planners leverage cutting-edge technologies on AEC projects.
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Computational Design In Practice
How To Define Business Value of a Computational Design Team?
Most Computational Design tools are essentially free. The real investment is in finding the right people and then advancing their computation capabilities. Design organizations should be looking for do-it-yourself creative thinkers that have a knack for making digital tools.
What Can a Computational Design Team Do For You?
The most common task, to start with, is automating certain repetitive, mundane workflows used by many in the organisation. Then, the CD team could be leveraged for rapid prototyping of ideas, evaluating building performance and creating custom tools and plug-ins.
How To Assemble a Computational Design Team?
Nathan Miller from Proving Ground has discovered a sweet spot for the makeup of computation-enabled design teams: the 70/20/10 ratio. 70% should have enough working knowledge of pre-made computational tools; 20% should be able to build simple tools and modify existing algorithms; 10% should have an advanced skill set in creating sophisticated tools and solutions.
BIM & Beyond
Marriage of BIM with IoT, Cloud Data Management and VR/AR Technologies
The future use case of BIM is not restricted to simply creating the Information model, but also updating it real-time through technologies such as IoT. This will enable automation based on real aggregated data. But for managing large data sets, one would need robust cloud data management. And to visualize such data sets for informed decision making, we need VR/AR technologies.
City Information Modeling (CIM)
While every Government wants to get on the ‘Smart Cities’ Bandwagon, there is little discussion on how to manage the enormous data that will be designed, modeled and collected through technologies such as IoT and so on. What we need is a CIM framework that will actually make smart cities happen.
WeWork’s Data-Driven Design Methodology Enables Informed Decision Making
WeWork is not your typical real estate company. It’s a technology company where its in-house architects treat interior design like software design. Using 7D BIM, they look at building as layers of interactive data. This makes far more information available to the architects, allowing them to make informed design decisions.
One More Thing...
Autodesk and Trimble Will Share APIs to Develop Products that Improve User Workflow
As an Industry, we should continue to pressure Software vendors to develop products that allows for interoperability and seamless integration. As designers, we should have the freedom to choose the right tool for the job, without having to be silo-ed within one ecosystem.