How Build Change is Powering a Global Resilient-Housing Movement

Build Change, headquartered in Denver, Colorado, is the global leader in systems change for resilient housing. Its mission is to greatly reduce deaths, injuries, and economic losses caused by housing and school collapses due to earthquakes, extreme weather, and fires. The nonprofit social enterprise’s engineers, builders, coders, policy advocates, and lending partners provide urgently needed housing solutions in the world’s most disaster-prone countries. 

TABLE OF CONTENTS

• CHALLENGE: How to create floor plans more quickly and accurately
• SOLUTION: Switching from rough, hand-drawn sketches to polished digital drawings
• RESULTS: Faster, better project planning for new resilient-housing projects
• OUTLOOK: More widespread use of this method across the globe
  
  

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CHALLENGE

“In the past, before we started using magicplan, we were basically hand-drawing housing sketches on paper,” says Stefano Pompei, Build Change Manager of Applied Technology and Impact. “Next, we would go back to the office, recreate the drawings with AutoCAD, and perform engineering calculations. Then we would implement the designed interventions to strengthen the buildings and improve their habitability, making them less vulnerable to disasters – earthquakes and hurricanes especially.”

However, that full process required a lot of time and was prone to human errors. “So, there was significant back and forth between reviewers and the engineers and the architects developing the plans,” Pompei states. “And sometimes the surveyors had to go back out to the field if they discovered something wasn't captured correctly in the original drawing.”

SOLUTION

Build Change moved away from cumbersome hand drawings in 2016. That’s when the organization began using the magicplan app instead.

Today, its field team members regularly use the mobile app to conduct a standard workflow. That workflow involves collecting room measurements quickly in the app via Bluetooth, producing accurate drawings in real time, inserting custom objects and comments as needed for clarification, and attaching photos for valuable context. Then they use the magicplan exporting function to save and store each completed drawing.

“Also, very importantly, we use magicplan to create a lot of custom forms,” Pompei explains. “We translate those into different languages, and we tailor them to different countries’ needs.”

RESULTS

According to Pompei, ease of use and efficiency are two key advantages that have made magicplan a worthwhile investment.

“It's a user-friendly way to draw a building floorplan when you are in the field,” he says. “You don't have to carry a lot of things, such as measuring tapes, papers, and pens, or spend a lot of time hand drawing sketches. That’s especially important in the places where we work, which are sometimes remote or present challenging environments. Also, working with digital data is much faster and less problematic than working with analog drawings, and it’s much easier to store and organize."

“Using magicplan also requires a lot less time, and so it makes our process more efficient. We can go to the field to visit a building, collect the information we need, and go back to the office to sync to magicplan servers. Then we download the collected data in a matter of seconds, so we can automatically create a 3D model of the property in Autodesk Revit.”

In fact, magicplan is so effective, it has enabled Build Change to complete structural assessments three times faster. The app also has reduced trips to the field by 33 percent.

OUTLOOK

In order to advance its vision that every home is disaster resilient, Build Change now offers its partners a proprietary software-as-a-service (SaaS) offering named BCtap. This platform is an end-to-end solution that pairs technology with subject matter expertise to take resilient housing programs to scale. Within the platform, Build Change shares expertise, best practices and digital technology to help others scale resilient housing more effectively.

The organization intentionally integrated magicplan technology as a core component of the BCtap ecosystem.

This allows Build Change to provide its partners access to magicplan’s digital measuring and drawing capabilities, to benefit financial institutions, government agencies and other global stakeholders that manage resilient-housing programs. In fact, Build Change representatives have been training partners on how to use magicplan for years, with efforts in Colombia ongoing for the past 8+ years and more recently expanding to Türkiye, as they look forward to onboarding many more partners in the near future.

Technology is continuing to transform the scope of what is possible and add efficiencies to each stage of the construction value chain. Build Change is protecting lives and livelihoods around the world. And the magicplan team is proud to be a part of that important mission.
BCtap encompasses Build Change’s 6-step construction value chain methodology to guide users through their resilient housing programs. Steps 1 and 3 incorporate magicplan technology.

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