Encounter Groups

Report from Ben Wallbank's group / return to Ben's Report on the rest of the event

We split into 4 Encounter groups, for one of which I was a facilitator. DNC rightly asked that we tell the groups not to talk about the premature release of 8.0 since we would all have spent our time moaning rather than being constructive. My group had fifteen members of which two were from the Graphisoft Human Interface Development Team in Budapest. We gave a brief description of ourselves and our work and wishes for the development of the software. The total number of licences represented in our group was 74 the PC's and Mac divide being 45 -29. One user represented 50 licences and the remaining 24 licences were spit between the rest of us (though there were three single licence users). Four people were still using AC 7.0 the remainder had upgraded to AC 8.0. The work types carried out on these licences included:  Education, Educational Buildings, Community, Arts, Commercial, Residential (one offs and multiple dwellings), Visualisation, Exhibitions, Restoration of Historic Buildings, Offices, Landscape architecture. 

The Graphisoft guys asked us to mention any interface improvements we could think of…these included:

• Dockable palettes
• Making the Layering system more graphic and hierarchical.
• Improving search and find within the Libraries.
• Providing Teamworking in Plotmaker.
• Integrating Check Doubles into the programme (a dialogue box to say you are placing a duplicate).
• Improvements to selection and re-selection (including the old drag a copy selection issue).
• Being able to set the height within each storey that the plan view is taken.
• Better text handling within AC.
• Mac users mentioned that a more Mac like interface would be nice.

Generally it was felt that a thorough overhaul of the interface was due. The fact that GS were taking a real interest in this was encouraging. Later in ACUE Herbert Peter previewed his book "ArchiCAD-Best Practice: The Virtual Building Revealed." One of his slides showed the proliferation of toolboxes within different AC versions..frightening. In discussion with others later there were a significant number of the opinion that AC should combine the roof, slab and wall tools into a single tool.  This would certainly reduce clutter.

Other things mentioned included:

• The need to improve import/export routines to Studio Max and Cinema 4D.
• The need for a better rendering within AC.
• The need for good sketch output quickly (better documentation and examples).
• Better backward/forward compatibility with older versions of AC.
• There was a common feeling that AC needs much, much better marketing.
• Still limited use being made of the Calculate Menu, though more use of interactive schedules now.

I was amazed to find that several users had no idea ArchiCAD Talk or any of the other web based support and information sources existed. 

Before we finished I asked if anyone could suggest any radical future developments for AC.  No one did. This, I believe, is a sign of the maturity of AC as a product and an indication that whist improvements can be made (as shown above) it is serving the needs of its users. Again, however, I found myself wondering where AC's edge over its rivals would come from.