Blue Marble Project

This article was originally posted at our sister site: the School blog

Welcome to a new series, GreenSketchUpGuide, here in the School blog.  I’m an architect and marketer in the building products industry, have been working closely with Google and School for over two years and have ideas about SketchUp and sustainable design to share with you.  My blog site, GreenDesignGuide.com, covers a broad range of topics for the residential design + building community but this series, GreenSketchUpGuide, will focus on particulars.  For example, why is SketchUp so valuable to designers and the companies trying to communicate with them about sustainable building products and processes?

Let’s turn to a case study that’s been incredibly successful.  In May of 2006, the cofounder of SketchUp software stopped by the Whirlpool Corporation booth at the AIA Architects National Convention.  Google had just purchased SketchUp and they were exploring some big ideas.  He shared their vision for creating an online repository of 3D building products in the Google 3D Warehouse that could be accessed by architects and designers who want to design with specific branded products they can trust.  What’s more, the 3D models would be free to download, easily imported into SketchUp and available for any designer using a CAD program that recognizes the .skp file format.  That’s a big vision and it took a few months to get my head around it.

But we quickly started drawing 3D appliance models in SketchUp to meet Google’s fall launch deadline.  As it turned out only Whirlpool and Marvin Windows met the deadline.  But the online press coverage we received was sensational.  Appliance websites, CAD websites and even financial websites picked up the story.  One industry observer put it this way, “Maybe IKEA, but I never expected a company like Whirlpool to be the first to collaborate with Google in creating 3D visualization solutions for architects and designers.”  I knew we were on to something, I just didn’t know how big it would become.

I visit architecture and design firms often and learned quickly how widely SketchUp was being adopted by the design community… once I started asking the right questions.  Usually I meet with principals and partners of top design firms, established professionals about my age. When I asked them about SketchUp, they pointed to younger designers and recent college grads that introduced SketchUp to their firms.  The principals immediately saw the productivity gains in their design process, the benefits to their business and were on board.

It’s been exciting to see “next gen” architects having this much impact on established design firms.  However, nobody at the time seemed to know about the building product collections in Google 3D Warehouse.  Don’t they have time to keep up with appliance industry press releases?  I mentioned this challenge to my friends at Google and that’s when they introduced me to School!

Sorry, I’m out of words.  Come back next week for more of this exciting case study (Update: Read part 2 of this case study here).