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Galloping digital technology has changed store designers’ tools, from pencils and T-squares to computer software and digital renderings. Here’s a look at the latest design software.
An architect time-traveling from the 1970s would find today’s design studios unrecognizable. Where there used to be drafting tables, now there are computer terminals.
His drawing pads, sharp pencils and T-squares have been replaced by software that does the sketching, measuring and calculating, and permits planners and designers to e-mail plans rather than putting them in the mail or getting on a plane.
But a designer absent for only a few years might also find enormous changes. Simple, flat, black-and-white AutoCAD line drawings are now in 3-D, with substances, colors, substrates and materials. Today’s virtual spaces not only allow planners to anticipate what a store will actually look like but also introduce merchandising density, fixturing needs, lighting levels, energy usage and where to put support beams, HVAC, electrical wiring, solar paneling and windows.
AutoCAD (for computer-aided design) has been around since the 1980s, developed by Autodesk Inc. (San Rafael, Calif.) as a software application to create primitive objects – straight lines, circles and arcs – on designers’ personal computers. A quarter-century later, today’s generation of AutoCAD software called Building Integration Modeling (BIM) introduces the solid properties of construction into 3-D drawings and documents, so that architects and planners can calculate spatial relationships, geographic information, materials, quantities and properties of building components into their plans.
“The newest BIM products allow us to generate and gather information all from a single model,” says Michael Bodziner, principal at Gensler (San Francisco). He says the newest terms are “integrated delivery,” in which the architects and consultants are all using the same platform of BIM, and “clash detection,” a tool that anticipates and reports potential problems, conflicts and interferences – what the computer industry dismisses as “human error.”
And the new technology keeps coming. Eco Tech Analysis and Green Building Studio track and analyze sustainability efforts to show how energy-efficient a building can be, says Paul Schmucker, a technical specialist in industrial design and manufacturing for Autodesk. “It shows, for example, where the available sunlight will be throughout the day and allows you to face your windows to the sun to maximize daylighting.”