“ADyoU” A solution to serve the needs of homeowners exploring the feasibility and early-stage conceptual design of an Accessory Dwelling Unit (ADU) on their property.
Intended users
-Initially, Homeowners (who are considering building an ADU)
-Then potentially engineers/architects and SMEs
Need you’re trying to provide a solution or support for
Homeowner’s difficulties with initiating and making design decisions about an ADU:
Preventing them from blindly jumping in on their own and building something over budget that can’t get permitted; and giving them enough information so that they don’t make an ill-informed decision against building an ADU due to concerns about unknown risks or perceived difficulties with the process. Most importantly, saving them time and money: (that they would have otherwise spent for an industry professional to take 10 times as long to perform the same feasibility and early-stage conceptual design process)
Users can effortlessly explore:
-If building an ADU is feasible in terms of constraints like cost or physical/engineering constraints
-What design options there are (i.e. shapes, structures, etc.)
*All through a simple parametric tool that presents options based on user’s environmental conditions (i.e. structural loads) and site size constraints
Inputs
- Building footprint area available/desired (length x width) (ft)
- Desired floor area (ft²), max exterior height (ft) and min interior height (ft)
- Structural loads: snow load, roof live load, superimposed dead load (psf)
- More ambitious but likely not practical within this project’s time frame: a user just inputs their location and the program references an excel sheet with typical loads for that location
Underlying logic of the model you’ll implement
The user inputs will be used to create a building form (bounding box) and provide some of the necessary variables to create a framing/beam system. Parts of steps 2 & 3 in Example 8.3.A.2 will be used to help define the roof framing lines. User’s geometry and structural load inputs will be used to size roof beams for a given beam spacing (and can also be used for other structural calculations as more features are added to the ADyoU tool). Then, the material QTO calculations can be performed which will then be used to calculate the embodied carbon and estimated construction cost.
Outputs
- Structural design for the roof system: Dynamo geometry, material QTO with element dimensions, volume, and embodied carbon
- Estimated construction cost
- Potentially: simple Revit model of the full ADU