What are the primary goals of creating a building model? Who are the key stakeholders?

• What do they need?

The stakeholders, or the users of this building, needed a workspace to research at the local biological reserve. This included lots of table space, a bathroom, a storage closet, and plenty of natural light.

• What do they care about most?

One of the major needs of the stakeholders was the building being easy to construct and sustainable in design.

How much detail should you include in your building model? How do you decide?

• As you develop your initial design?

I included little detail in the initial design- there was a lot of trial and error in the beginning on how the program worked, and so I couldn't concern myself yet with the details. I was far more concerned with getting the large pieces down and moving on from there.

• As you continue to iterate and develop on your design?

In the iteration stages, it was important to have enough detail to know where the placement of components were, but not enough detail such that it would be tedious deleting and replacing components every time you had to start over.

• What are the key stages?

The key stages of this assignment were the brainstorming/designing stage, the iteration stage, and the annotation stage. The iteration stage took the longest because I had to change so many parts of my design to fit all design specs.

• And how much detail should you include at each stage?

I think the design should get gradually more granular as time progresses- my strategy was to think big and slowly work down to the details.

How much detail should you include about the composition (layers, materials, thicknesses) of your wall, floor, and roof assemblies at different stages of your design process?

• Conceptual design
• Preliminary design
• Design development
• Construction documentation

Many door and window manufacturers provide Revit families for doors and windows that you can specify for your building design.

• What is the advantage to manufacturers for providing these families? (it's not free to create and provide them...)
• What is the benefit to you as the designer of using these manufacturer-provided families? Is there an advantage to using them versus the families provided in the Revit library?

What are the advantages of getting the Revit component families (for furniture, equipment, and fittings) directly from the manufacturer versus from an online sharing website like RevitCity.com?

For me, getting the components from Revit eliminated an extra step of searching for new components on a completely different platform. As a novice, it was much simpler to stick with what was already provided.