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Core concepts

Workspace, project, iteration, design, version — the five words the rest of the documentation assumes.

SpaceSync has a small structural vocabulary. Getting these five terms straight makes everything else — permissions, billing, sharing, versioning — follow naturally, because each of them attaches to exactly one level of this hierarchy.

Workspace
└── Project
    ├── Iteration
    │   ├── SpaceDesign  (drawing)
    │   ├── SpaceModule  (model)
    │   └── SpaceSheets  (canvas)
    ├── SpaceStory       (narrative + phases)
    └── SpaceShow        (presentation)

The containment hierarchy. AIRA operates at the project level, above any single iteration.

Workspace

The top-level container, and the unit that billing, membership and plan limits attach to. Every workspace has its own subdomain, so switching workspace changes the address in your browser as well as the contents of the sidebar.

A new account gets a personal workspace. You can belong to several and switch between them from the header.

Project

One piece of work: a building, a fit-out, a masterplan. A project owns its brief, its site context, its AIRA programme, its collaborators and its sharing settings. Most permissions you will actually think about are set here.

Projects can be favourited and archived. Archived projects become read-only and move out of the main list — they are not deleted. See Organising projects.

Iteration

A parallel attempt at the same project. Iterations are the answer to *"what if we pushed the core to the north instead?"* — you branch one, take it somewhere, and compare, without endangering the version you already like.

Iterations are storage scopes, not just labels

A great deal of local state — open tools, checkpoints, editor preferences — is namespaced by iteration. Two iterations of the same project genuinely do not share that state, which is the point, but it does mean an undo history does not follow you across a switch.

Design

The drawing or model itself — the document a module opens and edits. A design is what real-time collaboration synchronises, what autosave writes, and what a version snapshots.

Version

A named snapshot you can return to. Versions are append-only: restoring an old version does not delete the states after it, it adds the restored state as a new entry at the top of the history. Nothing you have saved is ever removed by a restore.

Versions and history covers snapshots, restores and what autosave does between them.

How the levels differ

Concept	Contains	Roles set here?	Billing?
Workspace	Projects, members, plan	Yes — workspace roles	Yes
Project	Iterations, brief, AIRA programme	Yes — project roles	No
Iteration	Designs, editor state	No — inherits project	No
Design	Geometry, sheets, model	No — inherits project	No
Version	A frozen design state	No	No