At the completion of the “Intelligent Buildings” course, I can confidently say that the included curriculum has greatly exceeded my expectations. Similar to a number of my peers, I also believed that the course would be in large centered around the BIM design and construction technique. The amount of material presented on BIM was sufficient, as it broadly covered the many applications of the practice but did not detail all of the many features, as would a class on the subject. I found the speakers and their presentations of the applications to be inspiring, partly due to my construction operations background but mainly due to the futuristic but real-world applications of the technology available to my peers and I. This was a recurring trend when the class learned about artificial intelligence and the many ways that the industry can use the technology to advance designs and continue to provide services to clients and the public alike in an efficient and highly sophisticated package. The information naturally sparked conversations about morals and values with regards to the artificial intelligence, which further reinforced the consequences that engineers and designers must always keep in mind. Our work directly and indirectly affects human lives in ways that are not necessarily measurable in the broadest sense. I found the information and projects including raw databases useful because it was my first experience working with them outside of sophisticated Excel programs utilizing macros. Databases can be used to record vast amounts of information and require the designers to make provisions for the system to be designed for user interoperability as well as system efficiency. The database section made me realize that they are used for a number of tasks of which many I witnessed at my workplace. They use a few in-house databases for estimating and pre-construction purposes which are increasingly more important with shrinking margins and new construction techniques such as design-build. The marketing department is employing a database for customer relation management (CRM) to build and maintain current, past and prospective clients. I recently learned a project management software that was largely a database that contained all important project contract documents such as payment applications, schedules and budgets. The program had many of the database characteristics and required the effort early in the project to properly organize information effectively. The information presented on sensors and recording information was useful to my career because I am a MEP engineering student. Now and in the future, I expect to see a lot of the monitoring practices that we learned in class make their way into all buildings. The term project I chose to complete reinforced the ideas of the sensors and data management and allowed me to think in detail the equipment required to monitor energy required for one aspect of a building. I found it important to hear the experiences of one of the speakers which involved sensors and energy monitoring from the field point of view, as it is imperative that the product of the designers work is utilize correctly and to its full potential.
After reading
Gabrielle's blog post and her feeling towards the database section, I've realized that while sometimes the least popular subject, databases can be used for a vast array of tasks. She mentions using databases for finances, for which I was surprised. I automatically use Excel when attempting to track costs and budgets, but her comment made me curious as to how the power to produce queries and reports can be used to track finances. Before this class, I would have not been interested in using databases to replace Excel with regards to computing and tracking finances.
