Learn Forma Site Design in 90 minutes: Workflows for design studios

Course overview

Autodesk Forma Site Design gives designers a powerful starting point for understanding how a site can shape—and be shaped by—the built environment. In this course, you’ll explore how contextual conditions, environmental performance, site constraints, and design intent come together during early-phase site layout and feasibility studies. Designed primarily for educational design studios, but equally useful for professional designers, the course guides you through key site planning issues, the relationship between building form and performance, and the process of creating, visualizing, and communicating simulation data as part of a data-driven design workflow. The primary course project is a low-rise downtown development adjacent to Route 66 in Springfield, Missouri—a middle-density urban site selected to demonstrate how Forma Site Design supports the kinds of everyday design challenges studios and firms regularly encounter.

By the end of the course, you’ll bring together site analysis, early visualization techniques, performance simulations, and design communication strategies to move from massing studies toward clearer building ideas and a more comprehensive design direction.

After completing this course, you’ll be able to:

• Evaluate site feasibility using contextual, climate, regulatory, and experiential data.
• Set up Forma Site Design projects for geolocation, navigation, and collaboration.
• Model existing conditions with context, constraints, and imported data.
• Develop massing proposals to test form, function, and feasibility.
• Run performance simulations to guide data-driven design decisions.
• Compare design options to identify trade-offs and stronger outcomes.
• Communicate design intent through views and the Forma Board.

The step-by-step video instruction totals approximately 90 minutes. The course also includes quizzes, practice exercises, and challenge assignments that give you opportunities to apply what you've learned. These activities take additional time to complete and are not included in the 90-minute estimate.

To receive a course completion certificate, you’ll need to click through all course content, including the videos, exercises, and challenges. While the hands-on activities are optional for learning, they must be accessed in order to track course progress. You’ll also need to complete the final test with a passing score of 75 percent to earn the certificate.