Have your cake and eat it, again!

Cooking books tend to get the balance more or less right:

They usually start with a juicy title to get your attention, a glossy picture to feast the eyes on then explain step-by-step how to get there, from basic ingredients and tools, through a series of tasks to a finished product.

Amazingly, the AEC as an industry has never really got the handle on these principles, nor how to effectively translate them into practice.

Throw a pile of construction drawings to a group of professionals (designers, engineers, contractors) and ask what they meant to convey and you’ll find a mixed-bag of answers.

If you systematically classified the answers, it is highly likely that you’d end up with two groups of thoughts:

Some will believe the drawings show what the building should (or will) be once it is completed and others will see the drawings as a set of instructions, for what various participants involved in the process need to do to achieve the information-originator’s vision.

Few would nominate both!

Nevertheless, all are likely to argue the superiority of one type of need (to convey the vision) over the other (to show how it needs to be done).

I believe that this confusion on what the primary purpose of the drawings should be also transgresses into BIM and hinders it from being developed into something meaningful.