Build Workspace

Overview

HP Build Workspace connects digital drawings and printed plans around one reliable source. I helped shape the product around the drawing as a shared workspace, keeping versions, markups, photos, tasks, and decisions together as work moved between the office and job site.

Role: Design Lab Lead
Focus: Product strategy and office-to-site collaboration
Timeline: 2023 – 24
Team: [Team and key partners]
Status: Live

Long story, short.

A drawing was central to the work. Its context was everywhere.

Contractors received PDFs by email, marked them up on paper or screen, shared photos through messages, compared revisions by eye, and assembled progress reports manually. Each step worked in isolation, but together they made outdated information easy to miss and project history difficult to reconstruct.

Approach

Make the drawing the collaboration hub.

We spoke with lots of general contractors and trades, spanning office and site roles with different levels of technical confidence. Their routines varied, but they all agreed that knowing which drawing is current and keeping the work around it is the most important thing.

The journey came together around four moments: storing the drawing, collaborating on it, reviewing changes, and communicating progress.

Building the workflow

01 / Store and share

Start with one ordered source. Design teams upload once, while every revision remains accessible, timestamped, and easy to trace.

02 / Collaborate on the drawing

Keep the discussion where the work happens. Markups, comments, photos, and tasks connect to the area they describe.

03 / Review and control

Make changes legible in the office and on site. Comparison views reveal what moved, while QR codes help field teams verify printed plans.

04 / Communicate and report

Let activity from the field return to the project record. Mobile capture, journals, and reports turn daily evidence into a usable history.

Three design decisions

One current drawing, context that stays attached, and a way back from paper.

Keep the latest version obvious without losing its history.

The system preserves every revision while making the drawing people should use clear.

Attach information to a place, not just a project.

Photos, markups, tasks, and conversations remain connected to the relevant area of the plan.

Treat paper as part of the system.

QR verification links printouts to their digital source, while scanning and vectorization bring paper markups back as editable layers.

Shipped outcome

HP Build Workspace is live around the parts of the workflow where continuity matters most.

Ordered, timestamped version history and visual comparison make changes easier to trace.
QR verification helps teams check printed plans against the latest file.
Photos and markups can be pinned directly to drawing locations.
Connected printing, scanning, and AI vectorization bring paper-based work back into the digital record.

The public product currently reports more than 6,000 professionals across 8,900 projects, with six hours saved per week.

About

Construction work will continue to move between screens, printed sheets, phones, and the site itself. This project was never about replacing those formats, but to make them point back to the same record. Once the drawing became that reference, office and field teams had less information to reconstruct.