30: Get a Drawing Pad with Digital Pen For Computer

I haven’t added to my Manifesto for Growth in 7 years, but I think this #30 “Get a Drawing Pad with Digital Pen For Computer” is a worthy add.

We bought Wacom One pads for all of us engineers, and we place them in front of our key boards for easy access to markup an email/PDF/word doc etc just like sketching on a pad.

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We have been using for 6 months now and here are sketches I did last week

In #27 of this manifesto “sketch poorly and sketch often” also applies to computer pads…

Drawing quick sketches is essential to being able to make informed engineering decisions. Drawings help us determine which elements are relevant and which may be safely ignored. These daily hand sketches are needed to help us make subtle discriminations about proportion, member orientation, constructibility, connectivity, etc. So we need to sketch and sketch often, but do we need to sketch well? No. Sketches should only meet one criteria - they need to be useful. They need to communicate a design intent and to help with decision making about the design. Feel free to sketch well as a hobby - by all means - add water color even, but for daily engineering, sketch poorly and sketch often.

In fact, you can even sketch without any consideration of craft and it will still be useful.

Shout Out to Our Steel Fabricators in New England

We are very proud to design steel connections (on too numerous of projects to name) and we sometimes forget to thank the best clients we can have! All those amazing steel fabricators and erectors out there.. Thank you!!!

We don’t just design standard stuff but love the complex connections, here are just a few connection we designed on a recent job… lots of love goes into these details and it is the fabricators/erectors that do the hard part of building them all.

And yes this is just a tiny sample of one single project (14 out of 18,143 connections we helped design on that one single project).

First Hemp Lime House in the US

The team (Estes Twombly + Titrington Architects) used a hemp lime system developed in France for thermal mass. Hempcrete or hemplime is biocomposite mixture of hemp hurds (shives, lime, sand) and according to the owner…

“this is the first cedar shingled hemplime house on the planet with some other notable innovations including a convertible closed-to-open deep foundation; a hybrid air-based / hydronic heating and cooling system; a geothermal system; a photovoltaic power generation system; and locally sourced materials with lower embodied carbon just to name a few.”

And there is no sheathing! No plywood so we developed wood braced frames. We also designed the foundation for wave loads (Cape Cod oceanfront) in the next 100 years with CMU walls that can be removed prior to a storm (or breakaway freely during the storm without damaging the house) which makes it capable of converting from a closed foundation into an open one, predicting a future FEMA code 50+ years from now.

This innovative project adds to our growing list including …

  • 2020 We designed this first hemp lime house in MA with the first convertible foundation on the planet

  • 2017 We designed the 4th Certified Living Building building in MA (the most rigorous building standard in the world, makes this the 23rd certified Living Building in the world)

  • 2015 We designed the first Passive House in RI

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