Upper Square: Designing online. Presenting online. Remote collaboration.Virtual designoffice. Online project delivery.

SAVING TREES AND TRAVELING TIME. PROJECT MARKETING AND CLIENT COMMUNICATIONS EVOLVING FROM THE WORK ITSELF EFFORTLESSLY AND EFFECTIVELY.

If you are a design professional, this scenario is undoubtedly familiar to you: you get a project, people work on the drawings and documents at the office, have regularly scheduled meetings, and courier drawings back and forth between different trades. Artists create presentation drawings for the clients who have to carry them around and show to potential investors.

What this means is lots of hours, lots of paper, time consuming design that is difficult to change and possible lack of coordination.

It is very hard to keep up with facebook, twitter, even e-mail in terms of speed and effective remote communication. 

Taking all of this work and making it available online makes everything a lot easier.

Virtual Web Presentations

When almost everybody carries around a smart phone, it just makes sense that design professionals should be able to bring the work to their clients any time, anywhere. 

Creating custom web presentations that can be accessed immediately makes it more likely for a client to get timely updates of  the design professional’s work and be able to show them to end users and funding agencies. 

Project collaboration sites

Every design project comes with its own collaboration website, where every one involved in the project can access the latest files, post sketches and suggestions, discuss coordination issues, set up project schedules and keep design team contact information. 

Services

Upper Square ltd provides design services with focus on sustainability. 

Building information modeling offers unprecedented intelligence to design, opening new avenues for the sharing of knowledge between members of the design team and allowing the team to work on solutions simultaneously. 

Defining clear responsibilities and deliverables for the design and construction team at the beginning of the project and facilitating open communication helps build trust and cooperation between all parties involved.

Interactive Project Environments

When an architectural project starts, the design team creates a content management system that allows for file storage, discussion boards, scheduling, virtual presentations, and project brainstorming. It can be integrated with social media for faster communication if so desired. 

This environment is a self contained virtual space for a specific project. It provides dedicated e-mail addresses, a well organized file storage location, multiple project sites, scheduling calendar, contact lists and other useful tools.

Look at a few examples of how this environment can help inform the project development process:

It all starts with an image

It starts with brainstorming and a few sketches, and turns into a fully functional model. The beauty of using BIM, and Revit in particular, is that it carries the project from conceptual sketches to full blown construction documents, and at each stage in the development offers a fully functional model that can be sliced, rotated, and zoomed-in to study every detail.

Building Information Modeling

3D modeling makes it real, the renderings provide clients with a tangible and believable outcome to look forward to, modify, or completely change very early in the design process and with minimal costs. It doesn’t even need to get from the virtual world to the paper, an image is evocative enough and can be shared in a multitude of ways, from e-mail to facebook to the dedicated project site. 

I actually designed an entire facility during a design charrette, by sketching things live in Revit while the end users were watching the sketch evolving on the projection screen, making changes, negotiating square footage and deciding on priorities. At the end of the design charrette the building turned into something I wouldn’t have anticipated, but that was exactly what the clients wanted.

Detailing, Cost and energy analysis

Add to this the possibility of slicing and rotating a 3D model to see it from every angle and in every detail and everybody has perfect clarity about what the building is going to look like and how it is going to function for them. 

Add to this again the fact that the virtual building is a computer replica of the actual future building, so one can calculate exactly the material quantities, to some extent the energy requirements, and estimate cost alternatives with greater accuracy.

Energy studies

A well made model can be easily translated into a format that the most used energy modeling software can interpret. Even though intended to offer guidelines rather than model precise building energy requirements, it can immediately pinpoint obvious problems, raise red flags about excessive energy loss or compare several designs to observe which one seems more energy efficient.

Material research

With the internet at the fingertips one can immediately search for sustainable building materials and search documentation to avoid the dangers of green washing and ensure that the selected materials will satisfy the LEED requirements for the desired building rating.

All of the documentation can be stored on the project site to be easily entered into LEED Online once the project is registered.

Your project on the web

An online presentation provides a viable alternative to a Powerpoint presentation and itmay be the fastest and most accessible way to show a project to clients. There are many advantages in replacing a static slideshow with a searchable website: ability to go directly to the page of interest, ability to post comments, access, dynamic presentation.