Wednesday, February 23, 2011

Don’t shoot for Paperless – Go Drawingless!


Search for BIM in AEC – and you’ll find the concept “paper based” mentioned often as the problem that needs to be overcome to DO BIM;

I disagree.
It is the ‘drawing based’ approach that is causing us trouble.

 ‘Paper based’ for me, means designing our outputs to suit the format, size of the medium and that is not bad on its own.
Drawing based is centred on the ‘projection technique’ (i.e. orthogonal projection – what 2D technical drawings are ‘made’ from) a risky solution that requires high level of skills from the operators. Skills the industry lacks.

I believe, that, it is the way objects are represented that is important, as opposed to what they are represented on;

 Many practitioners claim to be going BIM way by loading up zillions of sheets of digital files onto Aconex instead of printing them.

Strictly speaking, aiming for a ‘paperless’ project is not the answer for the BIM question.
Going drawingless is a a step towards it!

Look up my post on the PictureBook Documenting.
A modelbased approach, using the paper as ONE medium.
I also introduced you to the POD.
Now, when a computer is not available on site, you can still do ‘modelbased’!

On the basis of this dilemma and 2 others I put together a matrix on BIM personality types.
Are you BIM ready? Keep reading!



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