When the collaborative design software company Figma launched its public beta in 2016, its browser-based web and interface design tools were a quick hit, putting the startup head to head with the dominant design software company of the day, Adobe. The premise and the interface were so simple, Figma soon became a go-to tool for designers. The building design software startup Motif wants to do the same thing for architectural models. Through its platform, architects and builders across a project team can design and visualize buildings, and then collaboratively review and augment their designs, all online. [Image: Motif] Motif Design is a newly launched platform that is seeking to take on the established software tools of the architecture, engineering, and construction industries by making them more user-friendly and collaborative. The cofounder and CEO, Amar Hanspal, says the software that these industries rely on has for too long been overly complex and frustratingly difficult to use. Motif Design, he says, offers a new way, making it possible for even highly complex building models to be worked on simultaneously in real time by different teams. “By making it browser based, we are making it very accessible. One of the challenges of the old stack has been that it’s very difficult to use, it’s inaccessible, stuff runs on only PCs,” he says. Most modeling currently happens within the walled realm of software tools, where updates by one user have to be saved before others can make their own changes, individual files constantly being checked out and then remerged back in. Motif is taking the model-building tasks that are the core of architectural practice and allowing them to happen smoothly online, across the many teams that use them, running on a live database capable of recording every change to a model as it happens. “Just like Figma did with the design stack,” Hanspal says. [Image: Motif] Motif Design complements Motif Review, a browser-based collaborative wor

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