As slow, clunky, and tedious as it is, documentation has been and likely will continue to be the main deliverable for AEC professionals for the foreseeable future. At Arcol we want to make this process faster, easier, and dare we say…enjoyable? Our answer to all this is a feature we call Boards. We’ll get to how Boards are used for documentation, but first we need a little more context.
The rise of whiteboard tools in AEC firms
There’s nothing like a global pandemic to help foster innovation. AEC firms quickly adopted whiteboard tools like Miro and Mural during COVID to facilitate remote meetings about project requirements, plans and schedule, and mood boards. Anecdotally the usage of these tools has remained consistent and constant post-COVID, and it’s been exciting to see a browser-based tool make a wedge in AEC!
From what we’ve seen, whiteboard tools are typically used at the very beginning of a project. They act as a shared collaboration space and repository for project requirements and inspiration. Unfortunately, as with all the other tools in the AEC tool belt, there is no connection between these boards and the tools used for presentation, tables, modeling, and documentation.
Boards was in part the result of our wondering “what if you could stay in the same space from the beginning of a project through to creating construction docs?” Our vision from the beginning has been to create an accessible design space where all stakeholders in a project can collaborate and make decisions.
What are Arcol Boards?
At first glance, Boards in Arcol look like any other whiteboarding tool. You can do all the things you might already use Miro or Mural for today - text, shapes, pen, import images, etc. This makes Boards useful for early stage collaboration sessions.
Boards are so much more than that though! Here’s some of the extra spice we’ve added to our version of a whiteboard:
Model views
You can drag and drop model views onto a board, and these views are automatically updated when your model is edited. Arcol lets you create views for different design options, shadow studies, and styles, and boards are a powerful way to compare different views side-by-side. The whiteboard environment also lets you mix and match content, so you can easily put text, arrows, and images around your views.
Dynamic text
This is one of my favorite features in Arcol. The metrics that are displayed in Arcol while you’re modeling (eg. unit counts, square footage, cost) can also be displayed on boards! This means that as you edit your model, the metrics on your board are being automatically updated as well. You never need to worry about numbers being incorrect or out of date.
Sheets
Views and metrics wouldn’t be all that useful if you couldn’t get them out of Arcol. You can create sheets on boards and then place views and metrics on them to create a sheet set for sharing externally. Here’s where the whiteboard environment shines once again - you can arrange your sheets however you like on a board, and you can create multiple boards for organization (eg. 1 board for “inspiration” and another one for “presentation”).
Sheet templates
We know that firms have graphic standards, and branding is a key part of presentation. You can save sheets you’ve created on a board as a template to use in future projects.
Sheet sets
This isn’t exactly part of the boards feature, but it’s too cool not to call out. Once you’ve created a sheet set on a board you can share it out as a link. The receiver gets what looks like a PDF, but it’s a live updating document! Changes you make to your model update the views and metrics on your sheets, which in turn updates the sheet set in the link.
A new form of project delivery
We’ve been thinking through documentation from day 1 at Arcol, and having it be a core piece of the app from the beginning has allowed us to make sure everything works together as performantly and coherently as possible. We truly believe that all the benefits that come with being web-based (easy share-ability via link, live updates, and in-app comments) set up Boards to be a powerful new form of project delivery.
There were 2 pieces of early feedback that led us to create Boards. The first was a discussion I had with an architect in my second week at Arcol. During our chat they said that “architects sell drawings”. While documentation was already on our radar as a key part of what would be Arcol, this perspective confirmed that thought. A new tool for AEC would only go so far if you had to leave the tool and go somewhere else to create documentation. It had to built into Arcol.
The other data point was that we spoke to multiple architects who were trying to replicate the idea of a whiteboard in Revit. They would place multiple title blocks on a single sheet, but the issue was that when exporting Revit would condense everything down to the selected sheet size. This was a “ding ding ding!” moment for us, because anytime you see someone hacking a system it’s a strong signal to just go build the thing they’re trying to do.
In the last couple of years we’ve seen other tools follow suit to add similar documentation features on top of their existing platforms (one of them even called their feature “Boards” as well). This has been incredibly validating, and it is now abundantly clear that: a) People care about documentation and b) It is a part of the process that has lots of room for innovation.
Design decisions
There’s a couple things we’re doing a little differently in boards compared to existing tools. Our rationale is simplicity, and it seems to work well for our current users, but I imagine we’ll need to revisit them in the future as Arcol’s functionality evolves:
- Views are cropped on the board, not in the model. We want to stay away from the can of worms that is view management as long as possible, so we opted to treat views the same as images. There’s no limit on how many instances of a view can be on boards, so users can crop the same view in multiple ways if they like. This saves users from having to create multiple different views for what is a very simple use case.
- View scale is set on the board, not in the model. This decision follows view cropping - since we decided to set the crop on the board it made sense to put the scale there as well instead of having the settings live in 2 different places.
Beyond the decisions above, there are many small UX decisions that go into a feature like boards. Something as simple as copy/paste can have multiple options (should the element be pasted in the same place as the original, pasted at a slight offset from the original, or should the user place the pasted element?). Thankfully we now have 3 ex-Figma devs on our team to help with all the nuance!
A foundation for construction docs
We’ve never been shy about our ultimate goal for Arcol - to replace Revit. Of course it will take a while to get there, but Boards are just one of the decisions we made early on to set us up for this future. By enabling the creation of presentation documents in Arcol for feasibility studies, we’ve given ourselves a jump start to thinking about more involved documentation workflows like annotation and schedules. We’re absolutely convinced that Boards are a better way to do documentation, and we’re excited to have it grow and evolve alongside modeling capabilities as we continue to build Arcol into a full-fledged BIM modeler.