17 April 2023

Digitalisation

The future of the AEC industry will be very much about fluid granular data flows between design parties and design tools, as well as data-centric design insights and design assistance systems. In platforms like Speckle, we see first glimpses of the basic foundations of this new era of data-centric AEC processes.

As a proof of concept and based on Speckle, our Design Technology group envisioned a prototype for a design assistance system, a structural checker for column eccentricity analysis. With the Python script (see GitHub repository below), you can automatically analyse the eccentricity of vertical columns from versioned Speckle data. To achieve automation and to hide the complexity from the designer, you can integrate the code into a design automation pipeline leveraging Azure Functions, AWS Lambda, etc.

There is no need to contact the super user! As a designer, you should only cope with the design implications, not the complicated technological path in between. The manual and tedious workflow of checking drawings for eccentricity by overlaying drawing sets in AutoCAD or a PDF viewer can be translated into an automated design assistance system!