Comments for Zooming with Revit

Comment on Collaboration as it Could Be by Justin

Justin — Tue, 23 Dec 2008 09:55:25 +0000

Nice blog Greg!!!!

Hope you don’t mind but I have added you site link to my site http://www.revitthefrog.com and the Tips and Tricks page under great blogs..

Justin

Comment on Efficient Drawings by Dwane Stairmand

Dwane Stairmand — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 03:31:54 +0000

I always have this argument with the old 2d Cad operators!
I always bring it back to Speed of Documentation. I draw up using Metric, & most of my Sections etc are at 1:50, I use a 0.7m Pen weight on most of the system Families (walls, roof, floors etc) it hides alsorts of stuff. Its a great thing to do – Never mind the Details – they can come if & when the project goes forth.
I know of 1 CAD operator that did the above Parapets for 2 weeks – then in 1 swoop we removed them from the project – all that time wasted.

I think people have to sit down & work out what stage there drawings need to achieve & only do that – nothing more. Its Hard. But the results speak for themselves – a Set of Plans, Elevations & Sections of a 200m2 house in a Day.

Comment on Project or Process? by Greg McDowell Jr

Greg McDowell Jr — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 16:46:28 +0000

I’m probably using the wrong word but I can’t think of a better… besides, project and process both start with “P” and it makes for a better blog title.

It sounds like you’re using process in a way that I would suggest is a part of the project. You can’t worry about how to get a project done (its process) until you get the project. For me this sort of process and the project are indistinguishable.

What I’m trying to talk about is maybe better described as office culture or the more winded, how you run your business. There’s some obvious overlap between this and the process that you run inside of a project and I certainly agree that great design separates the good firms from the remarkable.

To be remarkable, to affect the changes we need to make to grow our businesses and industry today, we have to step outside of our comfort with the project as all important and take a hard look at whatever it is we’ve been ignoring. We need to work on our practice as much/more than on our projects.

Hey! Maybe practice is the word I should have used, and it even starts with “P”. w00t!

Comment on Project or Process? by Dave Baldacchino

Dave Baldacchino — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 06:37:00 +0000

Dangit Greg, I need to go to bed but I gotta leave some comments

This is a great topic and as much as I like the “process”, I feel that the Project is what’s most important.

Process is extremely important, especially in a large organization. It delivers comfort both to upper management when they’re hovering at 30,000 feet and not really “touching” projects, and also to clients. There’s an element of predictability that results in this sense of comfort, that there’s a roadmap for completing a project. This process is crucial when schedules are tight with little to no tolerance/slack. Without this level of comfort, your clients might start looking elsewhere. So explaining your process to them is very important to capture work right now, and to retain them for future work prospects.

Now everyone can have a great plan of action or process, but that doesn’t guarantee remarkable results. If one operates in a commodity market, process might be all it takes to get work. However, being remarkable isn’t guaranteed by process and in most cases, that’s what gives one firm/architect/designer/engineer the edge over the competition. Having said that, I like to think of process as a vehicle to enable us to be remarkable, to strighten the path from A to Z and cut down on unproductive exploration, thus freeing us up to engage in productive, creative design exploration. Now I can have more time to be remarkable, knowing that once I reach point “X”, I have a solid and predictable process to “package” the remarkable ideas into an expected deliverable.

We see too many great ideas fail because they get processed wrong/incorrectly, ending in a train wreck. If we solidify this portion of the “assembly line”, we can achieve better results. One thing working against coming up with this ideal process is the adverse effect of churn: you spend time nurturing a culture and teaching methods/doctrine and then some leave, only to be replaced by other employees who need to be nurtured once again, starting a new repetitive cycle. So process has to be simple to understand and quick to teach.

Time is a huge factor because if we had plenty to spare, then discussing process might seem trivial. On the other hand, if there are too many cooks in the kitchen, even with ample time, things might get spoilt if there’s no process/chain of command (I added some salt…did you do that too?).

Comment on What’s in a name? by Greg McDowell Jr

Greg McDowell Jr — Sat, 30 Aug 2008 04:10:55 +0000

Hey Jason, thanks for the kind words. Putting the old blog title in the sidebar was a good idea. Thanks for that too!

Comment on What’s in a name? by Jason Grant

Jason Grant — Sat, 30 Aug 2008 00:39:11 +0000

Gotta say I am going to miss the old name. Made me stop and look further at your blog but I understand the reasoning for the change. Maybe you can add it to a text box on the top of the right bar. Keep up the great posts!

Comment on All about Me… in one page by Jason Grant

Jason Grant — Sat, 30 Aug 2008 00:38:37 +0000

Comment on What’s in a name? by mel starrs

mel starrs — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 16:54:44 +0000

Aw! I liked the old name! But you’re probably right about the SEO. As for url, you can always buy a domain and transfer everything over. Can cause problems if you’re VERY established, but if you’re not getting the right traffic then it’s probably not too late…

Comment on IDEO in Architecture by Miguel

Miguel — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 12:12:21 +0000

For what I have heard, one of IDEO’s strengths is the way they embrace failure. They fail often and they fail fast. I wonder how this could be achieved in the Architecture/Construction ecosystem.

Comment on Drafting vs Modeling by Sweatshop Paradise Lost. again.

Sweatshop Paradise Lost. again. — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 13:37:36 +0000

Manual drafting was a tedious endeavor and it took a lot of people to produce the work. It was so labor intensive that people with the right skills were often hired to do nothing more than draft. Computer Aided Drafting did little to change things… if anything it has made the problem worse over the years instead of better.
hanging over a drafting board or computer is physically risky, but it’s not really “labor” like hacking apart chickens in a Georgia chicken factory.

Somewhere along the way we began producing more and more work in CAD and we got further and further away from what we were documenting and how and what we should be documenting. We began to add more and more detail into the drawings because we could. We began focusing on detail and nuisances and details that we never would have considered before… or at least focusing on them at smaller scales than we did when manually drafting. All this, and more, has lead us to see AutoCAD as a liability instead of an asset and now seems to require more time and, arguably, more people than it should.
and 3d rendering for… marketing!
one of those Peter Principle “malaphorisms” says that tasks will fill the time allotted.

Revit starts to change this…
(human) nature abhors a time vacuum. your question is, what kind of “added value” chores will ensue… architectural karaoke perhaps? architectural pub darts?
we’ve all heard of Architectural Plants. So why not Architectural Dogs? architectural frisbee catching….

what would you do if you weren’t drafting?
comment-bombing blogs?