Wash your hands! (or modelling purely for interpretation)

There once lived a Hungarian doctor, Ignaz Semmelweis whose biggest invention was to tell fellow doctors to wash their hands before attending to women in labour.

Will not bore you with the full story, but for me it is an inspirational tale, even though the rightful recognition evaded the good doctor throughout his life.

Can’t claim to have come up with anything even remotely useful in my life, however I often think of the doctor and the anecdotes that surround his promotion of the ‘clean hands, save lives’ concept, when I talk about employing modelling of construction projects purely for interpretation.

Even seasoned BIM-mers shy away from the idea that BIM could grow exponentially if this question was taken seriously.

For the sake of simplicity, let’s only look at documents supplied as IFCs*. As previously discussed, the  drawing-parts of these sets often number in the thousands (of sheets), not counting specifications.

Let’s also ignore people’s inability to read 2D drawings and transform the info into 3D within their heads**.

Instead, let’s just focus on the time that ONE person needs to assess all the documents once, chase all references through the ‘merry-go-arounds’ and ‘treasure-hunts’, compare various discipline’s information and confidently say, they ‘know’ the building.

How many people on an average construction site will need to do this?

You know your projects, do the maths!

* am referring to ‘issues for construction’ this time;

** anyone you ever ask within the industry will claim to be ‘over average’;