What are the primary goals of creating a building model? Who are the key stakeholders?
◦ What does each of them need from the model?
◦ What do they care about most, and where do those priorities conflict?
A drawing is a picture of a building. A model is a description of one.
◦ What questions can you ask a model that you cannot ask a drawing?
A model allows you to interact with the building more than a drawing, as it opens the viewer to a free-floating exploration instead of a set viewpoint of the building. In a model, you can enter into the various rooms and see how the logistics of the building will work, while with a drawing there is only one perspective that is considered.
◦ Are there things a drawing still communicates better? Give an example.
Drawings are great at communicating aesthetic and idealization of the building. If the model is the actualization of how the dimensions fit together and where everything goes, then the drawing is displaying how the building should be looked at and the tone that the building should give. If you want a building to look grand and important, the set perspective of looking at it from the ground floor up is lost when you can rotate and scale the building to be any size and direction you’d like. Looking at a building from the top down while it is shrunk diminishes the grandiosity of it.
This course splits the work across Forma, Revit and Forma Data Management.
◦ What is gained by using a different tool for concept, documentation and coordination?
By using different tools, it allows for each tool to specialize in their field and gives more optionality to the consumer for how they want to do their project. If one platform hosted all three, it might be convenient for transferring between steps but each step would most likely have less functionality. Splitting it allows for each tool to be built for more specific edge cases, more complex tasks, and faster IT help when there is an issue or bug of some kind.
◦ What tends to get lost in the handoffs between them?
- Simplicity. By having to switch between the different tools, the consumer needs to have more baseline knowledge to complete the task, as each tool is made differently and requires different inputs.
- Time. Having to download the project in multiple formats and transfer them loses time as well as information that gets lost during the transfer and downloading/uploading. Sometimes having different tools requires different formats, which can cause problems. There may also be crashes or misinputs in the process that set back the project.
◦ Who on a real project team is responsible for making sure nothing is lost?
Everyone is responsible to some extent, as everyone should be aware of how their tools work and what to do in case of a loss. However, there should be some safeguarding of material to make sure that the least amount of work is lost. IT officers should have some way to retrieve the data, and all the data should be saved frequently (especially during the transfer sections). Managers should keep track of progress and ask for regular updates so that the material is spread across multiple platforms. Or, by uploading it onto the cloud, it can be saved by many people.
Where should a building model actually live?
◦ What are the practical consequences of a model living on one person's laptop?
- Updating the model is much quicker when its on someone’s laptop. Because all of the updates are done on hardware, the processing time is much quicker and the data usage can be much higher.
- There is less risk of losing the progress due to a lack of save files or corruption. Because its on a hard drive, the memory is physical and thus is less likely to be lost.
- However, if said person’s computer does corrupt the file or lose the information in some way, all of the model would go with that computer unless it was saved elsewhere.
- Also, no one else can work on the project if they do not have access to it on their device.
◦ What changes when the model lives in the cloud, for the designer and for everyone else?
Pretty much the opposite. You are trading a faster, secure singular process for a slower but more accessible and savable process. Living in the cloud would slow down the progress, but everyone is able to work on it and everyone can access the old saves in case something bad happens to the current. It can also allow for live updates for the designer and the team to ensure they have more collaboration.
You will make hundreds of modeling decisions this quarter.
◦ Which ones are worth being slow and careful about?
◦ Which are worth being fast about, accepting that you may redo them?
◦ How would you tell the difference before you have made the mistake?