About Mudo
Architecture isconnected work.
Move one stage date and you have a resourcing problem, a fee problem, a client conversation and a drawing deadline. One event, four consequences. Almost every tool a practice is offered can see exactly one of them.
The problem
The connections are held by people.
A practice runs design, programme, people, fees, delivery, clients, consultants, builders and everything it has previously learned, all at once, on every project, usually with fewer people than the work deserves.
Conventional software separates all of it. The programme sits in one tool, the fees in a spreadsheet, the markups in another, the meeting decisions in a document, the invoices in an accounting package, and what happened last time in somebody’s memory. Each of those is competent. None of them knows the others exist.
So the connections, which are the actual practice, are carried by people. Someone has to remember that the extended stage makes the resourcing plan wrong. Someone has to notice the variation that was approved and never invoiced. Someone has to be the reason the consultant was told. That work is invisible, unbillable, and the first thing to fail in a busy month.
The idea
One system, in the shape of a practice.
Mudo is the intelligent operating system for architecture practice. That is a short phrase carrying three specific commitments, so it is worth taking apart rather than repeating.
- Operating system
- Not another application standing beside the others. The thing the practice runs on. Projects, programme, people, fees and knowledge are held together, so that a change in one is a change in all of them rather than a message you have to remember to send.
- Intelligent
- A consequence of the first. Because the system holds the whole picture, it can be asked what state the practice is in and answer from records rather than from an impression. It is not intelligence bolted on; it is what becomes possible once the pieces are connected.
- For architecture practice
- Built around stages, fee proposals, RFIs, variations, consultants, deliverables and drawings, because those are the nouns of this profession. Not a generic task with an architectural word written on it.
The commercial model follows the same logic. Mudo is priced per practice, not per seat, because the practice is the unit the software is built around, and because charging a studio for adding a graduate is a strange way to sell something that is supposed to help it grow.
The Brain
Which is why the front door is a picture of the practice.
Sign in to Mudo and you do not arrive at a list of tasks. You arrive in the Brain: every active project as a node, sized by how much is moving through it, coloured by whether it needs you, with the connections between them alive on the screen.
That is not a landing page we designed for this website. It is the application’s default route. Signing in takes you there, and so does asking for anything the product does not recognise. The Brain is where Mudo starts because, once a practice is genuinely connected, its state is the first thing worth showing.
Frank is the voice of it. He offers one pass of observations and then goes quiet. The code comment says he was already working before you arrived and has gone back to his desk. He never invents a number: his briefing is composed by rule from figures already on the screen, so what he says and what you can see cannot disagree. An assistant that occasionally improvises a figure is worse than no assistant, because you have to check everything it says.
Built for architecture
The test is whether the software knows what a variation is.
Plenty of tools can be configured to hold architectural work. The question is whether the concepts are in the system or in the way you have agreed to use it.
Mudo has fee proposals with stage breakdowns, exclusions and assumptions. Registers for RFIs, issues, decisions and variations. Drawing review with markup. Consultant fee requests that go out and come back. Portals for clients, consultants and builders. The builder one is unusual, and it is there because a practice’s involvement does not end at handover. A connection to Archicad, currently in pilot, that carries project information and drawing registers between the model and the practice.
None of that is something a generic work-management tool grows into later. It is either the shape of the thing from the beginning or it is a set of custom fields somebody has to maintain.
A secondary audience follows from this rather than diluting it: interior design practices run the same commercial and delivery structure, and Mudo suits them for the same reasons. The category claim stays architecture, because that is where the product is deepest.
Character
Serious, and not joyless.
Mudo is made in Sydney, out of the day-to-day reality of running architectural work rather than from a market analysis. That shows most clearly in the small decisions.
Frank’s restraint is one of them. So is Design Studio, a node-graph workspace inside the project for exploring options, which exists because designing is part of the job and not an activity that happens in a different application.
So is the arcade. There are nine games in Mudo. They are about planning setbacks, stair compliance, specification, structural grids and drawing markup, each properly built, and all of them sit inside a practice-management system. It is not a marketing device; it is in the product, and it is there because software that runs your working life can afford to be occasionally pleased to see you.
Setback Sprint · Setback Standoff · Detail Dodger · Spec Spiral · Redline Rally · Council Chess · Grid Runner · Stair Compliance · Render Rush
Method
What we will not do.
- Claim a capability Mudo does not have. Every capability page on this site carries a note naming the parts of the application it was checked against. Publishing that is unusual; the point of publishing it is that you can check.
- Blur availability. Something in pilot says it is in pilot, and offers you a demonstration rather than a signup button. Enthusiastic writing is not a way to make a feature more available than it is.
- Attack the alternatives. Where this site compares Mudo to other software it describes what each is built for. The tools architects currently use are good tools aimed at other work.
- Use your practice as an example. No client name, project name or fee from a real practice appears anywhere on this website, in any screenshot, at any point.
The argument is easier to check than to read.
Starter is free and covers one user and two projects, which is enough to put a real job into Mudo and see whether any of the above survives contact with your practice.