Changing room design: useful tools for teamwork

Changing room design: how to best manage all project phases through an integrated system

Are you dealing with having to design a changing room for a sports facility? Do you need a tool to facilitate collaboration with different professionals?

In this article, we’ll be taking a look at how to best design a changing room while collaborating with all the other team members involved. You can also take advantage of the potential of a collaboration platform and its applications for free, optimizing both costs and time.

Collaboration in designing a changing room

The design of a changing room requires the collaboration of several technicians who deal with different aspects of the building (architectural, plant engineering and structural). To facilitate work and cooperation you can refer to BIM collaboration platform that uses different applications to create BoQs, highlight interferences, view models, etc.

Let’s now move on to see how to optimise costs and time during the design phase.

Architectural project

When designing a changing room, the first stage involves drawing up the architectural plan, therefore arranging spaces reserved for different functions and the size of the rooms, in compliance with current regulations.

Rendered image of the changing room interiors created with Edificius

If you want to learn more about designing a changing room, we recommend reading the focus on “Tennis court and changing room design: the technical guide“.

You can even download the example file in IFC format that you can open with any BIM authoring and use as a reference for your project.

Changing rooms project: layout and structure

The second phase concerns the design of the technical installation systems and the structure.

At this point it is essential for the various figures to work together and exchange information directly. In fact, the three figures must cooperate as best they can to identify where to insert the colums, where to run the electrical network, how to arrange the drainage system, etc.

In this regard, I would like to remind you that you can learn more by reading the focus article “Tennis court and changing room design: the technical guide” where you can also download the example file of an electrical system.

In addition, to collaborate with your colleagues, you can take advantage of the usBIM integrated system of applications.You can stay in touch with other professionals at all times, thanks to the usBIM.chat and usBIM.meet services, while also using a cloud space to share content.

In detail:

• usBIM.chat is the application of the integrated usBIM system for creating dynamic chats with entire teams or individual collaborators.
• usBIM.meet the high-performance and advanced online meeting service with webcam and desktop sharing with your team members or collaborators.
• the cloud space is an online environment where you can upload and share all kinds of files with your colleagues. As soon as you register you get access to 10GB of storage space for free with the possibility to add more storage space through usBIM.store.

Let’s now move on to see the steps to collaborate with other professionals and optimize time and costs.

Let’s assume that we have finished the architectural part of the design of a changing room and that we need to complete the installations and structure modelling. It is essential, in this case, to share the project with, for example, the technician who designed the installations.

The first thing you need to do is accessing to usBIM.

Insert your ACCA account credentials (email and password).

If you don’t have an ACCA account yet, you can follow the steps below to create one:

• go to the MyACCA page
• insert your data to register
• insert your email and password.

At this point you can create a folder from the My documents section (top left), then select the New folder icon (bottom right). Finally, insert all the files to share with a simple drag&drop.

To share the folder (or a single file) with other people, click on the little man icon (on the right-hand side).

When the sharing is completed, your colleague will receive a message on usBIM.chat or on his email with the link to the file. Your colleague can now view the file directly online with any device and wherever he is, even if he does not have your same software.

Sharing a folder with usBIM

You can also take advantage of usBIM.meet to create video conferences and online meetings. This means that you can organise online meetings as if the participants were present through any device (PC, smartphone, tablet) connected to the Internet and able to open a browser (Chrome, Firefox, Safari).

usBIM.meet | The video meeting and desktop sharing application for online collaboration with your team

At the end of this phase you can proceed with verifications by federating the architectural project and the installation project with usBIM.federation and discover any interferences with usBIM.clash.

This step is of fundamental importance in order to avoid mistakes on the construction site and thus increase delivery times and construction costs.

How to federate 3D models with usBIM.federation

The usBIM integration continues..

To finish off your changing room project you can also prepare a bill of quantities thanks to PriMus online:

• directly on your browser without having to install any software
• wherever suitable (desktop or mobile, Windows or Mac)
• with easy-to-access and safe on the cloud data which you can share with anybody
• in real-time together with your team while communicating in the included chat service.