Design Automation for Digital Fabrication

Gensler is a global design and architecture firm. Organized into 16 diverse practice areas covering a broad spectrum of industry sectors, Gensler delivers a range of project types for clients around the world.
The firm has diversified into numerous forms of architecture and design since its inception in 1965, including commercial office buildings, retail centers, airports, education facilities, entertainment complexes, planning and urban design, mission-critical facilities, consulting, brand design, and other areas.

SrinSoft with its decade and a half expertise in Engineering and IT with key emphasis on BIM modeling, engineering design automation, design data exchange and lifecycle management, has been working with Gensler as their Preferred Engineering Partner for the past 7 years, since 2013.
We have been working with multiple teams and projects withing Gensler in understanding their existing workflow and then streamlining them for better efficiency. We have also been involved in providing Revit family creation and BIM services for many of their projects, with our expert teams both on-site and from our offshore development centers.

Gensler’s diversified design and architectural practices demand the usage of multiple modelling platforms like SolidWorks for mechanical design, Revit for BIM modelling, SketchUp and Rhino for conceptual designing, etc. Maintaining all their assets and managing them was a huge challenge, throughout all the projects at a global level.
Since they always had an increase of projects, they were also looking for an external partner to do the designing for them as that would increase their efficiency as well without increasing their team size and maintaining the costs to a minimum.
Also, when planning the architectural phase of buildings, there are a lot of components that need to be placed inside the BIM model and visualized virtually before signing-off the project to construction, to make sure there are no clashes or discrepancies during and after the construction phase.
This provides a lot of room for manual error as multiple standards are followed for every project and they vary from project to project as well depending upon a lot of factors like the type of building it is and the local standards applicable for the same.

Gensler’s predominant line of business involves architectural design projects which includes placing a lot of building elements into a complete BIM model for virtual visualization before project sign-off. This involved a lot of manual effort and also generated errors due to maximum human intervention.
SrinSoft, once putting the asset management tool in place, started developing a Generative Design Automation solution for Gensler to completely automate the placement of families in Revit, through an easy drag and drop interface which is in turn integrated to the Asset Management tool. So, approved designs that already meet the standards are just picked from the database and dropped into the layout. Specific roles, controls and access to the assets are defined at a project level so that designers involved in a project will only have access to relevant assets from the system.
A powerful generative design engine was also developed which would suggest the user on all possible combinations of placing families on a layout, based on some predefined standards and rues; the layout type and dimensions; number of families and their types; other obstructions and elements in the model.
The user can then choose the best combination to easily complete the layouts with the least time and the best efficiency, thereby removing errors from the equation as well.

One of SrinSoft’s major line of business is products and custom solution development in the Engineering and IT domains. Based on our experience working with Gensler, we were able to identify that they were in desperate need of a unified platform to centrally store, share, manage and maintain all their design data vis-à-vis their assets, both at the project level and globally as well, to enforce strict standards throughout the organization.
SrinSoft had set-up a separate ODC of almost 20 people and developed a Custom Database and Asset Management solution for Gensler to solve their issues and also incorporated a system to enforce basic rules and standards to verify and make sure that all the projects adhere to them.
This also helped saving a lot of time and effort in redesigning the same components over and over again, by rather helping them to choose from the existing set of approved assets and reuse the families that already meet the standards.

SrinSoft with its expertise with all the major software platforms, worked with their teams to provide support through our designers in our offshore development center, when they had a sudden increase in the volume of design projects. Since this was almost always, we had a dedicated team of over 70 designers working on various Gensler projects, especially for Revit Family creation and Mechanical Design. Due to the high quality of work, the efficiency, professionalism, highly competitive rates and very quick turnaround times, we were chosen as their preferred partner for all their engineering needs.