Blog 6: Course Reflection

My understanding of this course was that it was a first step in future-proofing my career without spending too much time on overly speculative guesses. Through reading assignments and lectures I learned about the past and present of the AEC industry and the tools it uses. This established a base understanding for the course to build upon with realistic predictions of what the future might be. The projects in the class were key to solidifying my understanding of the material. I found that the main topics of the course that have stuck with me are databases, sensors, and automated design tools like Autodesk Dynamo.

Before taking this class, I was not fully aware of how the industry had undergone significant changes with the advent of computers and new software. I did not fully appreciate the differences between CAD programs like Autodesk Inventor and BIM programs like Autodesk Revit. Now that I understand how a BIM program works, I could better understand how up and coming programs like Autodesk Dynamo work. I can see myself using Dynamo in the future, which is partially why I chose to work with it for my class project. Working on the project taught me a lot about computer troubleshooting both within and outside of the Dynamo interface. I would like to have spent some time in class learning Dynamo since it was somewhat difficult to pick up on. Regardless, the class served as a valuable introduction to Dynamo.

I wasn’t as taken with databases, but I still see value in them as they are an essential part of many other topics in the class. As Dr. Mitchell told us, BIM is a database at heart, so understanding the structure of a database is essential to coding in programs like Dynamo. The database project helped me understand the structure of databases and good practices in creating them. Beyond BIM, I found the use of databases in conjunction with sensors to be an engaging topic. Databases are a key component to many of the other topics covered in this course and I believe that they will continue to become more important to the AEC industry.

Sensors and intelligent buildings were very interesting to me and I agree with Dr. Mitchell: they will gain traction in the AEC industry in the near future. I think I learned the most about the proper use of sensors in intelligent buildings from Travis Peyton’s lecture. The importance of proper building maintenance and how a well-designed building would be useless without it was a bit of a shock to me. His presentation had a lot of practical knowledge and was eye-opening. From what I learned in class, I believe that sensors will eventually be very important to proper maintenance of a building and could provide valuable data to which can be used to improve building design. I would have liked to learn more about programming controls that use this data to optimize building performance and diagnose building health, but I understand that would likely require a fair amount of prerequisite knowledge. Overall, I found that sensors were an engaging part of the course and what I learned about them will be useful to me.

Knowing how the industry you plan to be a part of might change in the future is essential to any professional. This course offered a good look into that future and gave me a chance to develop relevant skills.

Ren,

I agree that briefly using programs like Revit was a great part of this course. In my case, I have had a fair amount of experience with Revit, but I think it was useful to have a refresher on it to keep me from losing skills. This class is one of the few times we are exposed to a nearly ubiquitous software within our college education, so I am happy to see that you learned a lot about Revit from it. I was a bit less familiar with databases, particularly Access, so I learned a fair amount from that part of the course as well.

Alkiviadis Tsitsios,

You are right; a little more description on how BIM uses databases would have been helpful. I had learned about it mostly from what I read for one of the posts, but had trouble sorting through the huge amount of information presented to me. I see that as engineers who simply use the software, we might not have a chance to use that information, but I still would like to understand it nonetheless.

M Kaptue,

I agree; this course has done a great job of showing us firsthand how the AEC industry is changing. I’ve heard about some of what we covered in class before, but I did not realize that it was something that could potentially become common while we are still working. This class brought the nearness of the future in perspective for me. I am thankful that I was able to take a class like this because I now can see these changes and help to bring them about, making myself an asset to businesses.

Nick Maloney,

You bring up a great point that I had missed: that there is a limitation to every technology. I had looked at this class with optimism, but I was remiss to not understand that all these new technologies and the technology we use today is limited. Not to say that you are being pessimistic; I would argue that your view is realistic. I’m reminded of the poorly maintained buildings that Travis Peyton mentioned. These new technologies will have issues like the technology we have today. This brings me to what I’d like to add to your point: people will also have to be able to troubleshoot those problems with new technologies. I believe that is where what we learned in this class will be useful.