Irina Viner-Usmanova Rhythmic Gymnastics Centre
Original project: CPU Pride
Programming Language: Julia
Algorithmic Design Tool: Khepri
Programming Environments: Jupyter, Pluto, NextJournal
The increasing complexity of current architectural design projects motivates the need for design teams to integrate different experts, creating more collaborative design environments. This allows the design process to benefit from more diverse knowledge and different problem-solving perspectives, leading to an increase in the quality of the solutions. The collaborative scenario, however, requires design representations that are understandable by all participants.
The Rhythmic Gymnastics Centre project was created with the purpose of testing existing notebooks and respective collaboration mechanisms. Pair, synchronous, and independent programming are common scenarios in any software development endeavour and several solutions exist to support them. The case of shared notebooks, however, introduces several issues that need to be addressed.
Collaborative scenarios: in (1) pair programming developers iterate synchronously over the same code parcel, in (2) synchronous programming they work concurrently in different sections of the same file, and in (3) independent programming they work separately and later merge their work. During the modeling process of this case study, we tested different alternatives for each of the collaborative scenarios.
The case study was inspired by the Irina Viner-Usmanova Rhythmic Gymnastics Centre, in Moscow, Russia, originally designed by the CPU Pride office. An AD notebook adaptation of this project was developed in five working days by three architects. The image below presents a schematic chronogram of the collaborative development process.
The project was modelled using the Julia programming language and Khepri, an AD tool that is portable between multiple design tools and that was extended to be integrated in the notebook format. We selected the tools we considered most suitable for the three collaborative scenarios - Jupyter, Nextjournal, and Pluto -, as well as two version control systems - GitHub with and without NBdime - and two communication platforms - Skype and USE Together.
Links
Jupyter & Pluto notebooks on Github
Jupyter notebook on Binder
Pluto notebook on HTML page