ESR5 – Alternate Means to Communicate Measure

AUTHOR: Dimitrie A. Stefanescu (@idid)

What is Speckle?

The ambition of Speckle is to enable a flexible and meaningful data rich design workflow between any stakeholders (technical or non-technical) involved in the design process and allow for users to structure their own communications channels and evolve their complexity gradually, from simple geometry to fully integrated BIM-like “smart” objects.
Speckle in its simplest form allows atomised geometry & data “sharing” and synchronization across multiple, detached software instances.

Speckle is envisioned as a federated design communication platform and protocol consisting of an ecosystem of Speckle Clients that communicate with a  Speckle Server. Speckle Servers can be deployed locally, by anyone and hold their own registry of users and data. The “social” architecture of Speckle is promoting a decentralised, user-controlled deployment that can be scaled up or down to fit the requirements of an individual professional/project to a large organisation.

Why does Speckle Exist?

Design problems are always unique. As such, they require bespoke crafting of communication channels that serve the specificities of the network of actors that contribute towards the a design’s realisation. Speckle provides low level building blocks for design-oriented communications, and gets completely out of the way when it comes to how to articulate said process. Speckle does not enforce any grade of complexity: it allows it to emerge organically out of the needs of the design process.

This is an excerpt from the Speckle White Paper, which was cooked up together with Luis Fraguada from McNeel. All comments are welcome!