B4 Mika Awai-Project Description

As a group, Amanda, Brian, and I have decided to research the various types of BIM software that assist in the design of green and sustainable buildings. With this research we will explore how these softwares improve the overall design process and how they can benefit the owners, engineers, facilities managers, and any other parties working on a project. 

To start, we were given guidance to determine what we deem green and sustainable buildings to be and whether we think they are the same or different. Most of the time we hear the two words interchanged when discussing building design, but after reading a few industry definitions and talking amongst ourselves, we believe that green is a branch of sustainable. Energy efficiency, water usage, and materials can also be considered to be branches of sustainability, where sustainability is seen as anything done to lower the demands on the environment.We have gathered a list of numerous different things that can be monitored in a building to help make it more sustainable. These include: water usage, building material, renewable resources, air quality, energy efficiency, building position/location, etc. Along with these building aspects, we have looked into few specific BIM programs that monitor and suggest changes that can be made to a building to improve its overall sustainability. A few of the popular programs that we have heard of or are familiar with are eQuest, Revit Insight, and Autodesk Green Building Studio, which all help in designing a sustainable/green structure, but are each tailored towards something more specific.

Being able to monitor the design of a building in depth from the start has the ability to improve cost, time, overall design, and most importantly the sustainability. These softwares not only improve the design process and finished product, but they improve the communication between trades. Owners, facilities managers, and engineers are all able to benefit from these programs, as they are able to suggest changes to a project that someone otherwise would not have thought of. We will explore what programs benefit each party and why, along with how these programs help in the process of becoming LEED certified. Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) is a point system that ranks a building on performance. The more points a building has, the higher the rank. The points are based off of five categories: Sustainable Sites, Water Efficiency, Energy and Atmosphere, Materials and Resources, and Indoor Environmental Quality, all of which can be monitored and designed through the various BIM softwares available for use.

Comments:

Michael,

You're project sounds very interesting. I had never heard of Kaggle before, so I looked it up to learn more about it. Although I am not familiar with coding of any type, but I find it interesting that you can create something that can predict energy usage based on the characteristics of a building and weather patterns. I find this model particularly interesting because it ties into the project I am doing with my group, which is how BIM softwares can help in green/sustainable buildings.

Varsha,

Your project reminds me of the start of this course. We saw that drones in construction are becoming more and more popular and we saw that robots are able to build chunks of a building off-site in a fraction of the time that people can do it. I like the idea of robots assisting me in the work I do day to day, and in a sense they are with computers, but I have yet to see it on a larger scale. Id like to know how and when they think these robots are going to be an everyday part of our lives.

Manon,

As someone who is discussing sustainable building design I think it would be cool to see how many fields within a building process are able to increase the overall sustainability. From a previous blog post, I know that 3D printing is hard to do on a large scale and the materials used in 3D printing are not evolved enough for many types of building. I do know that with additive manufacturing we are able to save money and time when it comes to the construction process.