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May 12, 2022

Six Tools at the Intersection of Technology and Design

The Metropolis Tech Immersion showcased the latest tech tools and platforms that can help you tackle challenges in architecture and design.

By: Metropolis Editors

ESG, lifecycle analysis, embodied carbon, virtual and augmented reality, and even the metaverse, these were some of the topics that came up during Metropolis’ first Tech Immersion event.

A series of interactive tool demonstrations anchored by a keynote from Michael Beneville, CEO of Beneville Studios and chief creative officer of Vatom, the event brought architects and designers together with the technologists building some of the most exciting tools in design.

Two tools aim to help architects and designers make better use of recent leaps in rendering and virtual reality technology. Enscape, which is a real-time visualization plugin for popular CAD programs such as Revit, SketchUP, Rhino, Archicad, and Vectorworks, promises a faster way to turn building models into 3D experiences. Meanwhile, The Wild is an immersive collaboration platform that allows architects and environmental designers to work together in shared virtual space.

Portrait of Michael Beneville
Michael Beneville is an artist, storyteller, and futurist. He is the Founder and CEO of Beneville Studios, an Idea Manifestation Machine based in New York City. He is agnostic to medium and scale, and excels at working directly with the C-Suite and top executives of a brand or business to express a company’s vision in 3-dimensional spaces and beyond.

The challenges of product specification were tackled by MindClick, which is an easy-to-use database of ESG information about thousands of design products, as well as mindful MATERIALS, a non-profit organization that helps architects target embodied carbon with a common materials framework.

Sustainability tools Tally and EC3 rounded out the demonstrations. Tally is a lifecycle assessment app that allows designers to calculate the lifetime environmental impacts of their projects directly in Revit. EC3 on the other hand is an open access tool that includes the first fully searchable, digitized, and standardized repository of Environmental Product Declarations.

From the metaverse to the tricky calculations of embodied carbon and the trade-offs of material selection and specification, today’s architects and designers face no shortage of challenges. Technology can help. By bringing tech innovators and their products together with the people who can use them, the Metropolis Tech Immersion event aims to unlock innovation in both fields.

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