While working several years in structural engineering / architecture and dealing with the crude marriage between email and Revit, I decided to finally push out a platform to provide what I see as a much better way to communicate with written words (emails / texts / chats / etc). This add-in for Revit, Sparkframe, provides a straight-forward way to continue communicating but adds some key features: in particular, live chat, direct linking to BIM elements, screenshot attachments, and simple-to-use task management.
It may sound like another personal information management system (i.e. Outlook), but because everything is directly tied to Revit elements, workflows can be more efficient, consistent, and less error-prone.
So instead of emailing a team member about "the wall between gridlines A-2 and A-5," send your comment to that person and attach the actual wall to the comment.
In the same way, instead of writing on a post-it "re-layout bathrooms," add yourself a task in Sparkframe attached to the actual bathroom.
By doing so, design intentions and decisions (DIDs) are made more clear, team members can follow along better (managers in particular), and design processes can be more easily transferred from one member to another, adding flexibility to design teams.
And what's better? It's all browser-based, meaning accessibility from mobile devices. More clarity, more flexibility, less errors. Check it out:
Sparkframe
Adam
