Blog Post 6: Course Reflection

I did not have much of an idea of what the class would be like, but I am happy with what I got out of it. I enjoyed the fact that there was a wide variety of topics, especially ones that I did not know much about. I knew about Revit and Building Information Modeling, but I had not taken classes that discussed sensors, robots, or AI much at all. It was very useful to broaden my understanding of what goes into intelligent building and where future technology is headed.

I have a lot of experience with AutoCAD, but barely any experience with Revit. The Revit assignment was very helpful in getting me familiar with the program and the step-by-step instructions, as well as the video walkthrough, was very helpful. I would have liked a second part to this assignment that walked us through using Dynamo as well. The sensor database assignment was useful as well, both in creating a database in Access from scratch and from trying to find data on different sensors.

The lectures and videos on 3D printing, robotics, and AI were all very interesting to me. I had already seen some of the technology that was shown because of my personal interest, however, I had not been keeping up with the new developments. Being able to automatically 3D print buildings and other structures will cause drastic changes in our current infrastructure.

I enjoyed the guest lectures, especially Kayleigh’s because I had never heard of visual programming before. I had been thinking about looking for jobs in BIM so it definitely got me curious when she said, “BIM is dead.” However, this sent me down a path from Building Information Modeling to Visual Design and Construction to visual programming and generative design. Generative design was the topic of my project paper and I learned a lot about it.

Overall, this class was very helpful, and I will use what I’ve learned throughout my career. The discussions and blog posts taught me to research new technology and think/talk about what changes will occur. It is important to learn about future technology and stay ahead of it or else you will be left behind. 


Comments:
To Sean Reifer
I am jealous that you did your project on Dynamo. It was something that I wished the Revit assignment went into. I can learn it on my own, but as you mentioned, it is more challenging to work through it on your own. A video walkthrough detailing exactly what you are trying to accomplish is very helpful in learning quickly.

To Nick Maloney
I agree that we learned about a lot of different topics, but did not have enough time to go in depth with each of them. It was definitely useful to get some information from the various topics, but there are some topics that I wish we went into in more depth. I believe the idea of the project was to allow us to pick what topic we wanted to learn more about during the course and do our own research which worked well.

Yicheng Li
I also learnd a lot of new things about 3D printing, sensors, and databases. I agree that the blogs helped us learn about something new and write about them almost every week as well as read other people's findings. My project focused on generative design which could become a problem when it comes to reducing or eliminating certain jobs. However, I believe some jobs will remain and their tasks will be altered and some new jobs will be created due to the changes within each industry.