Although I came into this exercise with some prior SketchUp experience, I still consider myself a novice in using the program. I’ve generally found that more complicated tools have a steeper learning curve, and are generally less intuitive. SketchUp, though, seems to fall on neither extreme; it has intuitive basic features, although quickly becomes less intuitive as you engage with more robust tools. Drawing a rectangle with a simple click and drag gesture? Not too bad. Extruding the rectangle up to make it 3D? After doing it once, it felt totally natural. Creating a component window that can be duplicated and simultaneously edited along with other component windows? A luxury I suspect most carpenters would opt for; not that intuitive, but not that hard to implement either. Attempting to compile a roof composed of several different angled panels? Quite difficult. I ended up resorting to a simpler model of the roof I was attempting to construct. Less is more, as they say.

I find ease of use makes for a good user experience, but an even better one is also efficient. While I still am puzzled as to the particular differences between a component and a group, I was able create a window once, copy it, and modify all of them in just a few clicks. I am quite fond of the DRY (don’t repeat yourself) design paradigm, and naturally gravitated towards this time-saving feature. Although it played no bearing on this project, knowing that I was also being memory efficient made my inner-computer scientist happy. Note to all future Sketch Up users: SketchUp wants to help you, and if you let it, it will make your life easier.

In the domain of research and/or teaching, I imagine this tool could be of great value in the study of ancient architecture that no longer stands today. I think you can learn much about a culture from its infrastructure, especially fine details of architecture that may be hard to fully understand with just a text description or a two dimensional image.