Week 10 – Couse Reflection

When I signed up for this course, I had imagined that we would be covering topics which would allow for the creation of buildings that are “better” or substantially “different” than existing buildings. In a way, we covered some topics which fit my initial framing of the class such as 3D additive manufacturing of cement and plastics and BIM but I was somewhat surprised by the discussions of sensors and database.

I’m usually not very fond of in-class speakers for the primary reason that the majority of the time the discussion ends up being very one sided (it’s all on the speaker) and somewhat boring, especially if you just ate a heavy dinner and run the risk of falling asleep. In Intelligent Buildings, however, the speakers were on average much more interesting and engaging. I was very intrigued by the variety and scope of BIM and how it is used/viewed in the industry nowadays and how this technology takes time to reach contractors in the construction world. Some speakers made me appreciate the work they do in the database or sensors realm, which were some of the topics I found least interesting in this course.

Even if I didn’t particularly enjoy the database assignment, it was still worthwhile to experiment with it since I had no prior experience of using MS Access. Learning how to create families in Revit was very worthwhile and made me appreciate the program and discover more of its capabilities. As for the paper we had to write on a specific IB topic, I chose to investigate the potential for using additive manufacturing in construction to create objects with multiple material types in one “print”. I could not find any one example since nobody has developed the technology or the method but I researched current examples of simple additive manufacturing and used my knowledge of the class so far to outline what needed to be done for this particular process to exist.

The blog posts were an intelligent way to get all of the student discussion out in a single, easy to read forum. I suspect this class format would not be this way a few years ago when not everyone had a gmail account, and I suspect this class will continue to evolve as new technologies in the building world continue to surge. Overall, I thought this class was very well worth my time.