I'm afraid we've been neglecting this blog a bit in the last month or two. There's a good reason for this though, as our team has been working hard on developing our new city design software.
We're interested in creating holistic integrated computer models of cities, which bring together all of the different specialisms - design, planning, financial, environmental, movement and liveability.
City Design on 'The Apprentice'
A couple of weeks ago, the last episode of The Apprentice was great fun to watch for anyone involved in the design and development industry.
The two finalists were given the task of coming up with a development proposal for a large site on London's South Bank. They had to work with architects and other advisors to come up with a scheme that was viable, but also high quality architecture.
The episode captured many of the issues that come up in large scale development projects, but we were particularly interested in how the teams dealt with the relationship between the design and the numbers.
On large masterplan projects, there is always a huge amount of information to deal with - for example floor areas, numbers of units and residential densities. The designer has a problem, as every time the design is changed, all of this data needs to be re-calculated. One of the key benefits of our software is that it will solve this problem and allow the design process to flow much more quickly.
The Dangers of Using Computers in City Design
We have several things in the pipeline for the rest of 2007. We're currently testing a new version of our street design tool called 'Streetscape Pro' and hope to make this available for free on our website very soon. Please contact us if you'd like to join the beta test programme.
We're currently investigating various ways that our CityCAD holistic modelling technology can help all kinds of masterplan projects - please sign up on our website if you'd like to be kept up to date.
Looking ahead, we're interested in exploring the positive and negative aspects of the use of computers in city design, and plan to organize an event later this year to explore these ideas in more detail.
We think that despite the obvious benefits of computer use, particularly in 3D work, there are some recurring problems:
- Misleading Accuracy - computers and print-outs can often suggest that a design is finished and resolved to the nearest millimetre when in fact it's only at an early stage.
- Limits to Design Geometry - like any medium, the processes and tools that people use to draw on computers can strongly influence the design itself, particularly if the design process is subject to time pressure.
- The 'Sketch-to-Digital' Interpretation - in the early stages of a project, designs will be produced by hand using pencil and paper. The process of translating these hand-drawn sketches into a digital drawing is a critical point, where the subtelty and elegance of shapes can sometimes be lost.
Please let us know if you have any views on this - we'll probably blog about the dangers of computers in more detail, together with some ways of avoiding trouble, later this month.
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