An Analogy
I bake bread. Sometimes my bread is pretty great, sometimes it’s a rock hard pancake of disappointment. A while ago, I decided that it was partly down to how I measure the ingredients. Perhaps the mechanical scales which I bought for £0.99 from Asda a decade ago aren’t as accurate as they once were.
For my birthday, in March, I was given some shiny digital scales which measure to an accuracy of one gram. It’s now July. In this time, I have baked many loaves and rolls. Some have been good, many have not, but I didn’t use my new shiny scales as they needed to be mounted on the wall and I didn’t get around to it and, well, I’m quite attached to my Asda scales – I’ve had them for years, I know them, I like them, they are familiar and comforting. They remind me of the many cakes I baked (and ate) at university.
Last weekend, I finally got around to installing my new scales. It turned out it wasn’t as difficult as I thought to put them up*. I have since made several great loaves and even some pretty good rolls, without a single disaster.
What is the point of this? I hear you cry. Well, all of you Revit users are sitting here reading this with a computational design package already installed on your computer. You’ve probably heard of Dynamo. Have you spotted the icon in your Add-ins tab? You might be frightened of the world of computational design, you might be happy with your current methods and workflows, you might even produce some pretty good results sometimes. But couldn’t it be better? Couldn’t it be simpler, faster, more efficient?
Now, I’m not suggesting that your successes and failures are merely down to chance, as with my rather dubious scales. What I am suggesting is that just because you’ve been doing something in a particular way for a while it doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t try something new. Experiment with a new tool, or a change in your workflow. Try using Dynamo to link Revit to Excel, or to draw some geometry, or to harvest some data. Who knows, it might be the best decision you ever made!
If you’ve never used Dynamo before, check out this post to get you started.
* for the record – I am currently cooking in a rather temporary kitchen with crumbly, lime rendered walls with cement patches, so fixing to the walls isn’t as easy as you might expect – I’m not just pathetic!