Re-thinking Rules of Thumb: New Opportunities in Architectural Design Timelines
It’s time to reconsider your rules of thumb for how long it takes to design a building.
Here’s a simplistic example. Let’s say you estimate 24 weeks to deliver a DD package for a small multifamily building. Where does the 24-week estimate come from? Past experience and expertise. You know what it takes to meet and exceed your client’s expectations with a design they will love. Your profitability relies on delivering the project on time and within budget. But what if you could accelerate your design workflow without any compromise in the quality your clients demand and deserve?
Our clients tell us that Skema fast forwards their process by six to eight weeks. That means you could deliver that DD package in 18 weeks, with a high probability that you improved quality by automating all those highly repetitive modeling tasks that sometimes lead to unnecessary errors.
Skema is faster because you can design the building in a more intuitive way, using chunks that act like ‘stretchable 3D puzzle pieces,’ instead of having to draw everything yourself.
Here are five advantages you’ll get from using Skema:
Get a head start: Select one of your firm’s many dedicated Skema Design Catalogs that includes design elements from your previous projects, transformed into flexible ‘puzzle pieces.’ Then, Skema assists you in designing a schematic layout for your building, adapting those puzzle pieces, which can be apartments, classrooms, patient suites - or any repetitive elements from any type of project.
Get your morph on: Experience the full design flexibility of morphing in Skema. Do you want those units to be 24 ½ feet wide instead of 24 ¾? Use Skema’s Morph tool, and it’s adjusted in a moment. You set the ‘parametric rules’ for which dimensions can change in the Design Catalogs, then Skema takes care of the rest, adjusting the puzzle pieces to fit the floor plans.
Plays well with others: Unlike other generative design solutions, Skema takes care of the repetitive parts of your design then can stay out of the way when you want to focus on unique elements and signature spaces, even allowing you to use other software to design the parts of the design to differentiate your proposals to your client.
Schematic to BIM in minutes: When you’re ready to move forward from schematic design, Skema almost instantly generates high-quality BIM LOD350 models for most of the project. All the puzzle pieces are embedded with the BIM data and detail harvested from your firm’s previous projects, along with all your standards and families.
Refine in Design Development: From a BIM standpoint, there’s no difference between a Skema-derived design and a traditional design. You just got here faster - in up to half the time.
With all that new-found flexibility and extra time Skema unlocks, perhaps you’ll choose to spend more time on the aesthetic of the project. Or you could reap the profits of a design brought in under schedule. Of course, you could harvest the extra resource availability Skema creates to scale up your practice to go after more work.
Whatever you choose, your design employees will now spend less time on frustrating procedural tasks that do not leverage their skills and aspirations, potentially creating higher employee engagement and staff retention. It’s up to you.
AI should help architects become better architects by helping them focus more on being an architect, not a computer operator. With Skema, the Design Development phase will never be the same. It can be more efficient, more engaging, and more profitable, which is surely a good thing.