How to turn an idea for an impossibly complicated calculator into reality
How to you completely redesign the process of calculating building cost estimates, quantifying the performance of your building design and at the same time measure its environmental impact?
When designing a building, architects and planners often face a critical challenge: balancing aesthetics, functionality, and sustainability. Here, Orchid’s web-based tool, Actually™, emerges as a game-changer for the building industry.
Enter Actually™, an industry first, cloud-based software developed by Orchid for Counterfactual.
Actually™ gives you real time access to the information you need to make good design decisions affecting cost, carbon footprint and building performance for your building project. It was designed from the ground up to be an architect’s right-hand tool, blending creativity with real data-driven insights.
At its core, Actually™ is a meticulous information synthesiser. It integrates Building Information Modelling (BIM), carbon, and cost metrics, enabling designers to see, in real-time, the consequences of their design decisions.
- Cost Efficiency: No more guesswork or post-design budget surprises. With Actually™, designers can access real-time cost estimates, paving the way for transparent and financially sound decisions.
- Carbon Consciousness: In an era that urgently calls for sustainability, Actually™ provides vital data on a building’s carbon footprint. It’s an invitation for designers to be part of a larger environmental solution.
- Performance: Beyond adhering to standards, Actually™ empowers designers to innovate. The tool facilitates performance calculations, revealing the tangible benefits of enhanced design decisions.
- Importing: Seamless integration with popular tools like Archicad and Revit means that designers can effortlessly import their designs and witness the transformative power of real-time data analytics.
- Reporting: The tool’s capability to generate detailed reports offers a streamlined way to share insights with the project team and maintain a project archive.
A key strength of Actually™ lies in its trusted data sources. Until now, quantifying a building’s carbon footprint has been a cumbersome affair. Actually™ is the industry’s answer to this, providing an intuitive and accurate method for gauging a project’s environmental and financial impacts. It equips project creators with the clarity needed to construct sustainable buildings for a better world.
- BRANZ: A crucial contributor, BRANZ equips Actually™ with a robust database focused on building carbon footprints. This data, tailored to New Zealand’s unique conditions, ensures the app’s recommendations are accurate and relevant.
- Costbuilder: To keep cost estimates up-to-date, Actually™ sources data from Costbuilder, which maintains a repository of over 13,000 data points, refreshed every six months.
Counterfactual have created Actually™ to help people make better-informed decisions in building design. The brains behind it, a team of New Zealand building designers, originally created the prototype as a tool for their own use. However, they soon realised that it had the potential to help the broader building industry as well which led to them bringing on Orchid as their technical partner to transform it into a modern, multi-user web application.
Imagine you’re an architect creating a new office building complex. With each design alteration, you can see how material changes might increase costs or how altering a structure’s shape might affect its carbon footprint. In a world striving for sustainability, think of Actually™ as a compass, guiding designers toward sustainable and cost-effective solutions.
