Category: Thinking

Taking appliance and cabinetry adjacencies, dimensional constraints, and cabinetry splitting (in addition to some of the variation present in the cabinets) I am proud to present a Kitchen Elevation MVP… To later include? Full parametric flexibility (elevations of objects, etc). Try it out here: https://kitchengener8.tiiny.site

I did construct a knapsack solver for kitchen layouts with heavy computation to check adjacency rules, and to generate every possible solution in the known universe. It needed to have its results trimmed to some 500 solutions max to not kill the webpage (I have no technical skills). After this I felt that a more […]

This little visualization has enough flexibility, I think, for a good simulation of what kitchen design is like. left click a cabinet to change its type. Because there arent any labels: Cabinets / Sink / Dishwasher / Range / Fridge. Kitchen Elevation with Diagonal Hinge Representation

Just looking at the cabinetry configurations possible with uppers/ lowers and their cabinet setting (like leaf count or drawer count). Check out a full page prototype here: https://cabinetconfigur8.tiiny.site

This simple one-dimensional kitchen configurator has a couple of options for adjacencies and a significant amount of pre-baked user-embedded logic. It also unveils the complexity of cabinets at a larger size. Will need to run another analysis for Uppers and drawer/leaf combinations.

Small Room Exceptions allow for fewer outlets to be placed (less than 12×12). Additional exceptions below to consider. Small Room Receptacle Configurator (Midpoint Placement) Room Width (feet): 8 feet Room Height (feet): 8 feet Receptacle placement at the midpoint of each wall. Total Receptacles: 0 Then the kitchen wiring on top of counter space gets […]

It is starting to feel like casework is the lorem ipsum of the interiors of buildings. This post just talks about them generally. Far as I can see there are three main buckets: Uppers, Lowers, Full HeightAll of ’em conform to the 3″ increment on widths, very standard 24″/12″ depths. Most are cabinets, 1 leaf […]

Behold: a virtual model of the switches in your house. Living Room Fireplace Kitchen Disposal Bedroom Ceiling Fan Lamp Bathroom Fart Fan Dining Room Chandelier Status: This is a simple reminder, that every room needs a light switch. Not every room needs much of anything else (other than plugs). These are its hygiene factors.

Since nearly every room needs power, we need a generic way to estimate (and ideally place) electrical boxes. Here is how it works. Two simple rules: an outlet within 6 feet of a door; an outlet at least once every 12 feet (around perimeter of the room) Room Receptacle Placement with Zoom Room Width (feet): […]

Reflected ceiling plans, and elevations are things I have run from so far in this blog, focusing mostly in plan. But now I think in order to describe the shear number of objects present in a room, an elevation guide will be necessary, if not required to coordinate them. Since every room will need lighting […]

I ain’t calling whatever this stack of work is BIM. This mystery project is simply titled OnlyPlans after our April fools joke from a year ago, and perhaps for my propensity to want to automate plan so I can think in elevations/ sections more easily. System rules for the OPMVP so Far: The Facade Container […]

Much more intuitive scenarios to review. The bar chart has hover text if you don’t want to use the key. Building Area Weight Visualizer Select Scenario: High-density housing Blended Load Factor: 0 sq ft/person And a key to explain: Subtypes Explained Subtypes Explained Color Subtype Explanation A-1 Places for big shows or performances, like theaters. […]

I’ve referenced the floor load a few times. Its composed of its component parts (all of the sub-components of a building type). Here is how it works at a conceptual level. IBC Occupancy Calculator IBC Occupancy Calculator 15 ppl/sf Assembly A-1 0 15 ppl/sf Assembly A-2 0 50 ppl/sf Assembly A-3 0 7 ppl/sf Assembly […]

The code rewards the base building area for being further from other things, and for having more of your perimeter open. The ‘Width of Open Space’ as I am reading it is more like the distance from building bulk to the next bulk. Most setbacks fall into 20′ of open space. Though I am sure […]

Buildings are lots of smaller buildings. What is the maximum building area of the building I am currently working on? Well, its driven by code. And once you hit the max, you need another fire area, or fire wall. Since fire walls are expensive, we want to minimize their occurrence, and keep building areas and […]

Looking into how to be more accurate with required exit counts. Here is a calculator walking through how the spirit of the code works. You get 50 occupants for your first exit door, after that you need two exits (with a 10x buff to 500 occupants). Blended Occupant Load & Required Exits Calculator Blended Occupant […]

I spent a lot of time cranking out those frames of manually drawn bedrooms. I thought to myself, lets build some dynamic blocks in autocad to help? So I ended up asking chatGPT for assistance in building an app that could help me make vaporware. Wait. Its the AI age. Why can’t I simply build […]

How many doors do I actually need? Life Safety Information for the current door I am looking at? What might it look like in a building life safety system? Check out the app: Egress Calculation App Building Type Residential Commercial Industrial Assembly Educational Factory & Ind. Institutional Mercantile Storage High Hazard Door Width 32 in […]

Room of Requirements Below is a table of how I might begin with room based services. Today, I’m primarily worried about life safety, as that will drive door sizing (minimums) between rooms, and an active life safety algorithm will need to be a part of this for anyone to trust it. Rooms with larger load […]

A boring post about…Doors And their Parameters. Door Things The underlying data basically supports that the default door leaf is 36″ wide and 1 3/4″ Thick. In the spirit of only plans, we will ignore height for now. Alright back to the basics of architecture. A wall is basically gyp+stud+gyp. This means that the Jamb […]

I suppose I could take on a kitchen using a slew of lookup tables. The data probably has errors because my intern is chat gpt. Reviewing sub-types of specific appliances give us the building blocks of a more complex lookup table Combine it all Looks like were dealing with lots of boxes inside boxes. With […]

The generic single dimension array configurators are possible (as explained poorly in Generic Room Configurator I, II, and III). Now we need to break down all of the room types we have based upon what services the rooms need. My dumb brain immediately cant decide to do this for a bedroom and I need to […]

I had jury duty and cranked out 30 frames of design intent. Essentially as the back wall dimension changes, the solver will output what is the most stuff it can fit into the room. Behold: a bedroom. Immediately my thoughts go to the clearance area around the bed. The drawer clearance for the bedside tables […]

In my last post I endeavored to simply show a single array in a singe condition. Flexing the idea a bit to see if it has legs, here is what it might be able to do if it had multiple walls. Perhaps there is a hint at a second dimension, when the algorithm would skip […]

There comes a time in a man’s life when he realizes that he cannot create a bespoke configurator for every possible scenario. What about lower scale problems? What about a configurator for a bedroom? Or for a utility room? These are rooms without a TAM in which to create valuable automation in, mostly because interns […]

In the last installment about paper space I discussed a desire for the paper to be automatically handled, and for the documents to automatically be scaled and sized. Using my experience at TestFit I know that generating PDFs is quite important to customers, but why stop at PDFs, when you can do a more generic […]

In nearly every case, when a user is drawing a wall they will eventually end up with a room. Why not start with the room as the first order of thinking? Well, here is why. In elemental systems like CAD and BIM there is no concept of embedded intelligence. These systems are records of design […]

Likely the most confusing thing to get your early designer mind wrapped around is that your modelling software and the medium by which you present said model to anyone that is not you are widely different. One is a very capable tool with a lot of buttons that terrifies potential clients with its very business-like […]

There are slews of symbols on the construction document sets that to the untrained eye are terrifying. I’ll break it down into a few sub-categories. First there are the Tags. These are non-geometry information that explain what a geometry is or to find more information on that geometry. Scales As the users drawing becomes smaller […]

Invariably, if your desire is to automate the drawings of buildings, I would start with dimension strings. Not just any strings. Do the ones for the whole building. Do all of the smaller dimensions add up to the large dimension? This is often obfuscated by annoying CAD levels of detail where electrons somehow matter. Too […]

First class at university I was taught that a door is a portal. Ludicrous. A portal has either a blue glowing boundary or an orange one. Doors have hinges and strike plates. Doors are by far the most important object that defines the space that is between rooms, and is the defining element that puts […]

Building the robotics required to automate construction is likely trillions of dollars of capital investment. In the meantime, closer to earth is an opportunity to understand the nature of drawings, how to make them better, and cleaner, so that we humans might communicate to one another more cleanly. My personal design philosophy centered around automation […]