What is the Hack about?
It's all fairly explained in the video. In a nutshell: it uses a series of HTTP requests and webhooks between MS365 platforms (PowerApps, PowerAutomate, SharePoint), Speckle, Rhino.Compute and Unity to quickly generate rudimentary structures and facades that then can then be quanitifed to look at not only embodied carbon, but embodied energy, embodied water, mass and volume. The PowerApp and PowerBI interfaces are the two key UIs and allow users to engage with design parameters and resultant design data. The unity interface allows users to get ""inside"" the model and experience its scale, materiality and atmosphere. Rhino.Compute uses a series of GH scripts that generate the design geometry and data, and we have configured Speckle to have branches that are sequential so that each ""design stage"" is stored separately.
What inspired us for this Hack?
We are all relatively new computational designers and are very new to the development world. We all had a couple of skills we wanted to develop (unity, rhino.compute, rendering, REST, UI/UX) and pieced together a solution that offered us all a chance to engage and learn. We knew that we couldn't build a custom web app from scratch in two days, and saw that as an advantage. Often there are significant barriers to good design and we believe the low/no code technologies can scale in ways that can allow people to engage in design processes, even if the outcomes are rudimentary (we love cubes ;) ). Skipper takes the designer out of the process and allows users generate a ""rough sketch"" of a building footprint, structure, core and facade so that they can understand scale, and the environmental impacts of building these assets that last a while and can have a big impact. By using the MS automation suite and RESTful API we are able to share data between platforms that don't traditionally ""talk"" to one another and we think that we have a found a solution that can serve a lot of people and communities with a few additional tweaks (more typologies, more parameters, better visualisation).
How was the Hack built? What technology did we use?
"PowerAutomate, PowerApps, SharePoint, RESTapi, Rhino.Compute, SpeckleServer, Grasshopper, Rhino, Unity, Python. We had an existing data library for the carbon data and a rough template for configuring the Rhino.Compute and dealing with the webhooks."
What accomplishments are we most proud of?
All of it. We are all graduates straight out of uni. Only two of us know a programming language, and we managed to work as a team to generate something that we are proud of. The end result was a culmination of a few days of good team work, communication and significant skill development, and we came together as a newly formed team, which was the primary purpose of entering.