Wednesday, October 19, 2011

Airport security and BIM

I spent the day flying again.
Don’t wish to list all the airport-jokes that come to mind, have visited the US enough to put me off that reckless habit, for the foreseeable future.
I still like to examine the practice of screening passengers from a psychological point, but with no political undertones whatsoever and as a result, almost always end up pulling together some useful lessons as I queue to have my bags x-rayed once again.

Operating within the AEC industry and regularly dealing with sets of documents prepared by respectable (and often internationally spread) consultants for designing various buildings, I have this problem of not trusting the content of their sets very much.
Consequently, I am forever searching for a magic x-ray machine through which I could push any old set of tender- or IFC (as in ‘issued for construction’) documents and have the magic screen show me all the traps that are hidden within the examined paperwork.

Just as the operators of those machines are trained to spot vicious looking nail scissors, cigarette lighters and lethal knitting-needles, I’m confident we could come up with schemes where professional spotters could highlight areas within building drawings sets where reckless cut and paste has been applied to, generic details used irresponsibly or multiples of non-dimensioned floor plans issued.

Well, time to learn something from airport security.

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