Projects
Creating a project
The new-project wizard, the With AI and Without AI branches, and what each field affects later.
Open My Projects and click New project. The wizard has up to three steps, and which of them you see depends on a choice you make on the first one.
Step 1 — Basics
- Name
- Renameable at any time. It also seeds the project's URL slug, which stays stable when you rename.
- Type
- Residential, commercial and so on. This is not cosmetic — it shapes the assumptions AIRA reasons from when it proposes a programme, so set it honestly.
- Units
- Imperial (ft-in, sq ft) or Metric (m, m²). Imperial is the default. This is a property of the whole project, so pick before you draw.
Units are set per project, not per person
Changing a project's units changes them for everyone in that project. If you only want *your own* display to differ, that is a personal preference instead.
With AI, or without
The Basics step ends with two cards.
- With AI
- Continues to the site and brief steps, and sets the project up so AIRA can generate a programme from what you give it.
- Without AI
- Finishes immediately and drops you on the project dashboard with an empty project. You can still import a site afterwards, and you can still run AIRA later — this branch skips the questions, it does not disable anything.
Step 2 — Site
Locate the project and define its parcel boundary. You can search for a place and draw the boundary by hand on the map, or upload a boundary you already have.
| Method | Formats | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Upload a boundary | .kml .kmz .geojson .json .zip .dxf | The source file is recorded as the boundary's provenance, so later steps can say where the parcel came from. |
| Draw by hand | — | Click to place vertices on the map. Recorded as hand-drawn rather than imported. |
A defined site is what makes spAIce site analysis — sun, climate, setbacks, buildable envelope — possible. You can also export the boundary back out as GeoJSON or KML.
Step 3 — Brief
Describe the project in prose, and attach the documents you already have. Both feed AIRA's context.
| Limit | Value |
|---|---|
| Accepted formats | .pdf .docx .xlsx .xlsm .csv .tsv .txt .md |
| Maximum files | 5 |
| Maximum size per file | 10 MB |
Tip
A brief that names constraints — budget, storeys, statutory limits, must-have adjacencies — produces a far better first programme than one that only names room types. AIRA will ask about gaps, but it asks better questions when it has something to push against.