More Control, Less Risk: 4 Essential Questions About Skema
“More often than not, a lot of design intent, data, and hours of effort get lost when moving from the schematics phase to BIM, resulting in significant amounts of re-work. Similarly, because of the limitations of BIM workflows, you redo the same design problem — be it an assembly or a layout - in every new project, even when you have BIM-solved the same in a number of previous projects. Firms pour in significant labor-hours re-modeling spaces, objects, and components, as there is no optimized, intelligent way around it. The result? A lot of time and resources that could otherwise be spent on the actual design process, is lost.”
— Niknaz Aftahi, aec+tech
The AEC industry is no stranger to tedious, painstaking workflows.
Designers spend weeks iterating to achieve a functional, reliable design scheme — only for production teams to spend even more time rationalizing it and translating it into BIM models for construction.
Niknaz Aftahi, founder and CEO of aec+tech and a trusted voice in design technology, explored how Skema challenges assumptions and redefines what’s possible.
We’ve pulled out four essential questions from the aec+tech profile on Skema.
1. What are the primary benefits that clients typically experience when implementing Skema into their workflow?
Win work with less effort: Skema helps architects easily and quickly create multiple high-quality design options to share with a client, reducing the time, effort, and risk that architects currently undertake while pursuing new project work.
Exceed client expectations: By automating the repetitive parts of a programmatic design – roughly 50% — the designer can focus on the remaining 50% for signature spaces such as lobbies and experiential elements of the building.
Maintain design control: Skema’s BIM Knowledge Reuse Engine unlocks a firm’s IP stored in previous BIM projects, turning selected, repeatable design elements and firm standards into high-fidelity design catalogs that the firm, and only that firm, can apply to new projects.
Get more value from your successful designs: Skema lets designers quickly arrange, adapt, and morph their firm’s fully vetted design elements to fit new concepts. Addressing and solving for detail design during schematic design frees up a significant portion of the fee budget.
Produce more informed options: A designer can create multiple design options using Skema’s puzzle piece approach and/or Skema’s integrated metrics to reach a desired aesthetic and functional design proposal.
Get BIM in minutes not months: When the designer is ready to move forward from Schematic design, Skema almost instantly generates high-quality BIM LOD350 models, accelerating the creation of BIM deliverables by as much as 6-8 weeks.
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2. What inspired Skema’s development, and how does it tackle challenges in architectural software?
Most firms use distinct and separate tools at various design stages. As they move from one tool to another, some data loss occurs. This is particularly true during the schematic to BIM transition, in most cases requiring complete rework of data. Each instance of data loss introduces additional time and potential errors. We focus our efforts there.
Skema gives Architects a path to embrace design automation while leveraging the inherent value locked in the BIM systems used by a majority of firms globally.
Skema focuses on repetitive work in an architectural practice, offering designers easy-to-use tools that run on a web browser. The significant reduction in time Skema achieves in delivering a LOD350 BIM model gives architects a major advantage in driving the shift to modular construction across the industry’s growth segments.
Data Integrity
In Skema, the work performed during conceptual and schematic design isn’t lost or discarded. Instead, once the process moves into Design Development and Construction Documents, a boost in production is realized with zero data and time lost to the process.
Our customers are saving weeks and months of rework because of the Skema workflow.
BIM Reuse
There are elements of BIM that lend themselves to AI & automation, specifically the highly repeatable design elements that have been well-defined in past projects. Even the most complex designers have highly repeatable interior elements.
Modern building methods are forcing architects to provide more and higher levels of designer detail earlier in the process. The Skema workflow produces high integrity models that owners, builders, and developers can trust.
3. Who uses Skema, at what project stages, and for which types of projects?
Skema is for commercial architects and designers, particularly those designing buildings with repetitive room/unit typologies: schools, hotels, residential, healthcare, data centers, etc. Our tool allows them to pursue new work with less risk, while saving two-plus months of manual BIM entry on every project.
Because Skema leverages past designs for new designs, it doesn’t fit neatly into traditional design phases.
Skema’s front-end conceptual design environment has familiar and simple-to-learn sketching tools (or you can use your tool of choice). We have push-pull, mass, and SketchUp-like type modeling, as well as geospatial context. You can quickly resolve site planning, site context, massing, and sustainability challenges during the early schematic design phase.
But there’s one major difference between Skema and every other conceptual design tool: its BIM knowledge reuse capability.
Skema transforms a firm’s proven and BIM-rich unitized design elements — whether created in Revit, ArchiCAD, IFC, or any other BIM software — into Design Catalogs for new build, adaptive reuse, and modular projects. By turning a firm’s valuable BIM outputs into BIM inputs, designers can resolve detailed design elements during the schematic phase. This greater precision and accuracy supports Modern Methods of Construction (MMC) and can save weeks of laborious BIM modeling tasks.
4. Can you explain how Skema helps leverage design knowledge from previous BIM projects?
With Skema, clients are able to reuse and repurpose their existing successful projects for various building typologies. Skema is the only conceptual and schematic tool that uses a firm’s own high LOD BIM as input, and we call that our BIM Knowledge Reuse Engine.
Firms select the project(s) they want to use and pull specific unitized design elements into their Skema app. These new unitized design elements form their new Skema Design Catalog. They incorporate all your design standards from those BIM models, including sheets, line types, and font types. If the data is in your BIM model, they’re in Skema. As your schematic layout goes to BIM, your design standards remain intact, so you don’t need to redraw any of that.
The elements in the Design Catalog are flexible, morphable, and deterministic “puzzle pieces” that easily snap into new layouts, providing designers with complete freedom to customize their own designs in new ways. They can experiment with whole chunks of the building to solve the overall arrangement during the feasibility phase.
“Skema seeks to address a very particular and pressing industry-wide problem that hasn’t been tackled head-on before.” — Niknaz Aftahi
Find out for yourself how you can harness your firm’s BIM intelligence and reuse the knowledge for big improvements in time and resources.
Click here to read Niknaz’s full Skema profile on aecplustech.com