Getting architect to use Speckle

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I am still new to Speckle and need some advice. I am involved in a huge number of projects with different project organisation, different stages and different architects where I need to extract data from architectural Revit models. Usually geometrical data to perform thermal simulations. The architects does not know me since I am not always directly involved in the projects, they do not know about Speckle and they do not aways understand what data I need. I now wonder if you have any idea how Speckle can be used without scaring or creating extra work for the architect in projects like this? Usually, asking the architect to send a gbXML or even a custom IFC is to difficult.

/ Max

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Hey Max,

Thanks for prompting a good discussion topic! In general, we’ve seen two main ways in which Speckle gets adopted on projects:

  • a top down one, where it’s “mandated” by project managers
  • a bottom up one, where people see the value and therefore use Speckle

The first case is usually when PMs realize the amount of information they can easily gather and then leverage by continuously “harvesting” their models. They can consume it via systems like custom dashboards or PowerBi integrations (we have a bunch of these on our roadmap). Or simply they want to enable people like you to do their job better and faster!

The second is when the designers have interoperability or collaboration needs, or simply want to visualize and share their models online. We are also working on various new features such as comments that will enhance collaboration even more.

So ideally either of the above could be enough to encourage your architects to use Speckle. We’re also working to simplify a lot the process of adopting and using our connectors with features such as the 1-click send and scheduled sends, but if you find or think there might be other barriers to adoption, let us know, we’d be eager to hear from you!

Finally, you could also ask them to share an IFC with you and consume it in a similar way to how @m-clare did, but using files has its drawbacks :wink: https://twitter.com/eng_mclare/status/1504704071772475396

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Thanks for a great reply. I think we will see the first way in many projects in the future but until then I think I will be the only person in the projects using Speckle and that this will be a strange and scary thing for many architects (installing unknown things on their computers and having to learn this just bacause of me). It is very similar to ask for gbXML, always a problem for the architect.

Therefore I think it is important to make it as easy for the architect as possible. Preferable I would like to be able to set up the entire data selection for the architect so it is just a press of a button. At least in Revit since I can do this in viewer mode. ArchiCAD will be more difficult since I can not open these files. An other problem is that the architect probably needs to add data, for axample rooms that covers the entire internal building volume. Not sure how to solve this, maybe running some script before sending the data since the architect probably does not want this information in the BIM-model.

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