Wednesday, April 13, 2011

Communication practices in construction are blacker than needed to be;

‘Communication’ is a clever word.
It can mean conveying information one way (me instructing you to do something) and/or two ways (you and I exchanging information about something)

For example, I may put a note on our dining-table in the morning: “Zs clean the dishes!” – this is a one way communication (instruction);
If I come home and find another line below: “Sorry, it is E’s day today” – the communication goes two-ways.

I regularly work with IFC drawings (IFC – issued for construction) soft and hard copies.
I see one-way communication.
Fair enough, they are supposed to convey instructions on how to put the building together. 

Still, I suspect that because they know this communication is one-way – the originators of the material intentionally make the receiver of the information struggle with it more than necessary.

Apart from the previously described pointless mounting of the number of outputs, they use another trick:
Output in DWF format with all lines showing black and with true thickness. This is naughty!

DWF is a good format to use as a reference (non editable) – but not allowing someone to edit information should not also prevent them interpret it in the fastest possible way.

If I was a project manager – I’d prohibit “All black” drawings on my projects.
(even if the hard copies stay greyscale – all the soft copies should be coloured);




1 comment:

  1. Another thing that I, as an estimator of construction, have seen is that if I can get the model that there are less objects containing information and more blobs of geometry that are defined on a 2D sheet with a note. So having the model in this situation is only a little helpful as it pertains to having a true BIM. Do you see a future where Design Firms take the time to create intelligent objects to use within their projects or even take the time to properly add finishes to things such as floors and walls?

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