Uses of Databases in Design Offices

Databases in the design office environment are like professionally trained personal assistants who can respond to various types of commends with a click of a button. Designers mainly benefit from archive databases which can provide multiple disciplines of information immediately while working on a project. Design companies are starting to build their own databases which archive all the designs they have produced before and all the research which went behind the completion of all those designs. For example University of Salford, UK and John McCall Architects (JMA) are collaborating on producing a database which will assist with a process known as Knowledge Management which can provide aid to designers at JMA to work more efficiently on their projects.

The database for the Knowledge Management strategy will act as an employee of the firm which knows every detail of work that the firm performed to date which will always stay with the firm never to be lost due to retirement, termination, or so on. Additionally this virtual employee’s knowledge will be accessible for all employees all the time through the database setup with “features including the incorporation of video and audio clips, links to external authoritative sources, content qualifiers in the form of source or reference metadata, and annotation capabilities to capture tacit knowledge” (Egbu and Sidawai). So let’s say an structural engineer is designing a special joint which he or she is not fully sure of how to encounter the design of that joint, the designer can search their companies’ database and see if that type of joint with similar constraints was design before in any of their projects. If so the designer does not have to start from scratch because the database will provide the history and facts about that design such as the efficiency, positivity, problematic factors, constraints to be caution with and so on.      

          

The database being used for Knowledge Management process at JMA is one of many different types of databases which are part of the design industry today. As Maria Gonzalez mentioned in her blog post of how databases are part of the BIM design process which provide the functionality of keeping information of all the different components of the building which results in the facilitation of documentation, cost estimations, and etc. which allows designers to work more efficiently saving cost and time. Both the database Maria and I mentioned provide better efficiency leading to common benefits of saving time and cost, some key results of successful databases.   

Sources:

(Egbu and Sidawai) http://www.itcon.org/data/works/att/2012_5.content.03794.pdf