As a practicing architect and in-house specialist, I helped lead ZGF in designing and developing a portfolio of reusable tools and created Pylos, an integrated knowledge sharing platform, to get them into the hands of designers.
ZGF Architects
Pylos
Product Design, UX Research, DevelopmentRaising the Bar
The Project Performance Team was tasked with raising the bar for sustainable and high performance design for projects but struggled to harness resources. Project teams were reinventing the wheel even within specific projects and a wealth of high level resources laid dormant within project folders. Pylos was the effort to raise those tools up, build a process for collecting them and harnessing Pylos as a way to share.
Project teams adopting Pylos as a resource helped establish project standards for sustainability, carbon and energy, healthy materials and integrated fully into firm-wide systems and resources.
Goals:
Reusable Tools
The transition from creating tools for design optimization to tools that drive design often required having an expert on the project team. Pylos addressed this by rebuilding tools that were flexible enough for the average user to adapt and apply to their specific projects. Help information and integration into Revit, SketchUp, and firm-maintained content libraries ensured easy adoption.
I worked with project teams, in-house specialists, and the tech team to design and build Pylos from the ground up. The project was a living project where improvements were part of a continuous feedback cycle while working with teams on real projects.