Focus
You’ve been on a long -- and hopefully insightful -- design journey:
- creating a design concept for a new building
- defining project goals, setting targets, and brainstorming strategies to achieve them
- exploring conceptual design options to consider which best achieve your goals
- designing a schematic layout and translating that into a real building form
- articulating the building envelope features and analyzing their impact on performance
- designing a structural layout and analyzing the size of critical elements
- choosing an HVAC strategy, designing a layout, and sizing its components
- designing and laying out the essential components of the plumbing systems
It’s time now to reflect back on that journey from a higher level and share your insights about the entire experience.
Final Design Journal Entry
Your Design Journal entries this week should reflect back on your design journey through class from a higher level and share your insights about the entire experience. Please create a brief Executive Summary that shares your concluding thoughts about your entire design experience thru the quarter.
There's no need to repeat the detailed analysis and information shared in your earlier design journal entries. We can go back and review your earlier entries for the details on specific topics.
Rather, use this concluding journal entry as an opportunity to reflect on:
- Key / Essential / Unique Design Features that you explored in your project.
- Your Big Successes -- what worked very well and what features you're most proud to share as examples to inspire others.
- Your Big Challenges -- what aspects of the project created the biggest challenges and what would you do differently (in hindsight) to avoid or overcome these challenges.
- Lessons Learned -- what sage words of advice would you share with other students who are embarking on a similar project.
Please summarize these thoughts in a Design Journal entry on this shared Notion page:
Latest Versions of Your Project Models
Please also upload all the latest versions of your project models to your Autodesk Construction Cloud project folder. Please place these versions in a folder named Final Check-In. Be sure to include these models:
- architectural model
- site model (if it’s a separate model)
- structural model
- mechanical/HVAC model
- plumbing model
Please also copy the latest versions of these models to create one integrated model in your Coordination Space. You can use this integrated model to help share your project in the video tour.
Video Presentation and Tour of Your Project Features
Please also create a brief recorded presentation and guided tour of your project features where you share a few examples of those successes and challenges.
- Keep it very high level -- approximately 10 minutes (more or less).
- Use any combination of media that you feel best shares your ideas. Think about how you can use:
- Some presentation slides (Google Slides or Powerpoint) to share the big bullet points.
- Some views of their integrated project model to show how you implemented your designs and illustrate those points:
- You can use screenshots of individual models (from Revit) or the integrated model (Coordination Views from your Coordination Space ).
- Another very effective approach is to use the First Person mode to do a walkthrough of your integrated model.
- Use the arrow keys to move around.
- Use your mouse to look around.
- Double-click to teleport to a new location.
- Use the Model Browser to Show / Hide entire models or specific categories as you give your tour.
- It may be easier to capture the most important model views as screenshots in advance, so you can move through them quickly during your presentation.
- Use any video recording tool that you like. You have free access to Zoom -- the system that we use to record the class sessions. If you use Zoom:
- Decide whether to share your video (show your face) as you present or not (record the screen only). Either is OK -- use whichever you prefer.
- Check your audio input source to verify that your sound is being captured.
- Click the Share Screen button at the bottom of the Zoom window abd choose your Desktop from the list of windows available for sharing. Selecting Desktop enables you to switch between application windows (for example Revit and the Autodesk Construction Cloud interface) in the same recording.
- Choose Record (from the More menu), and you’re ready to go!
TIP: I’d recommend doing a 30-second test video first, just to confirm that you’re all set up and capturing the information that you’d like.
Parting Thoughts
That’s it! You’ve completed your first journey through an integrated design process -- from design concept thru system design. Hopefully, you’ve enjoyed the process (at least parts of it) and learned a lot along the way!
Many students comment at this point in their journey that “if I only knew then, what I know now, I’d do things a bit differently.” And that’s a great point to be in as you wrap up this journey.
Designing all the systems in a building is very complicated on an individual system basis, but even more importantly, as design teams (with many individual designers each optimizing for their individual discipline) tackle the task of designing an integrated system of many sub-systems.
If you’re carrying away an awareness of the considerations that drive the design of each system and an appreciation of how the design decisions for any system affect many other systems, you’ve accomplished exactly what I had hoped for in this course.
Be proud of what you’ve accomplished in your design project! And don’t sweat all the small details that aren’t quite as resolved as you’d like them to be. In a real project, we’d have months or even years to resolve these details. To accomplish what you have in our short time available is truly phenomenal, and you should be very proud of that!!!