Best Practices

This best practices chapter will give you a few tips on organizing your families in Kinship. A couple of ways to get the families you need more quickly are to work efficiently with Kinship and, especially at the start of a project, to populate the lightweight Revit template with families.

It's generally recommended that you use the Revit-plugin to import individual families and the web app to import multiple families into Revit at once.

Lists

In Kinship, you have the option to group Revit families into lists in addition to organizing them by family. This makes it easier to select families for a specific category and means you don't have to scroll through all the different wall families, for example. When you use the search function (in the Revit plugin or the web app), you can select a specific list as your source instead of the entire library. Since only Kinship administrators can do this, just get in touch with X-lab.

We have already created the following lists:

Wall According to the wall construction manual, the lists are grouped by chapter based on wall type (exterior wall/interior wall) and wall construction. This lets you quickly browse the wall type and construction you need without having to scroll through the entire Walls chapter (244 elements).

Floor A list that includes all Hulldekker floors.

Prefabricated rooms In the Plumbing Fixtures chapter, we have grouped the prefabricated (parametric) bathrooms into a list to make them easier and faster to distinguish from the other Plumbing Fixtures.

Groups

Together with LivLab, we've put together a Project Start group. This group includes a selection of walls created specifically for the sketching phase, as well as various standard windows and doors. This lets you start a project that aligns with A-lab's requirements. The name of the group is:

LivLAB_BOLIGER_SKISSEPROSJEKT_OPPSTARTSPAKKE

If you need them, we can also create additional, more specific groups for various purposes. Since only Kinship administrators can do this, just get in touch with X-lab.

Collections

Another way to work more efficiently with Kinship is by using Collections. There are two types of Collections:

Private Collection You can fill these yourself with elements from the library based on your needs. For example, you can add the walls you use most often or standard windows and doors for your sketch projects. This allows you to create your own starter library and you can create numerous Private Collections. You can use these for different purposes (for example, by project phase or building type), but remember that only you have access to it and you can't share this Private Collection with anyone.

Collection (public) The (public) Collection works the same way as the Private Collection, but it can only be created by a Kinship administrator (again, just gete in touch with X-lab). This might be a little cumbersome, but the advantage is that this Collection can be shared with multiple people. This allows you to create Lab-specific collections, for example, or collections for teams or projects.

We have alreadz created the following Collections: Kanalbyen, Elvebygget og Verksåsen.