Senior Design Project BIM

I will be working with Jay Ng and Mitchell Butler. My group and I chose the project topic of "Senior Design With BIM" with the theme of making our building green, specifically to make the building and the site net zero. We chose this project not only because of the convenience of using our senior design project to help us with this project but also to document the differences between BIM and traditional approaches to design. We plan to document the use of BIM using Revit for the design of our building and comparing it to Google Sketchup. We will possibly compare AutoCAD to Revit if time allows for it. I think the challenge will be to document the use of BIM as an amateur Revit user as the full potential of the program may not come to fruition. It would also be a good idea to explain what is required of a typical construction project and explain how Revit can meet or not meet the requirements as opposed to using Google Sketchup or AutoCAD.  The theme of our senior design project is a net-zero building and site. The proposed site is an urban agricultural farm that will grow crops and serve the community. It involves net-zero in energy, water use, and environmental impact. Our project is trying to do this through rain water harvesting, erosion sediment control, photovoltaics, and other systems in order to reach our goals. We will see which approach will be able to achieve these methods. I also think we should evaluate the user friendliness of these programs as well as giving our own recommendations as to what the companies that make these programs can do to make them better. I think we can also explore how Revit can assist in the civil engineering parts of the project at least when it comes to modeling the building and the site. Looking specifically at Lorena Alvarado's post, I can come to think of a lot of ideas in which our project alone can use sensors. Since we are trying to achieve net-zero in energy, water use, and having to irrigate crops, we could use a whole host of sensors.