Suffering from a BIMmer’s-block? Join the club!

I’ve been troubled by a massive BIMmer’s-block for a while.

The equivalent of what is known as the Writer's block, a condition, primarily associated with writing, in which an author loses the ability to produce new work or experiences a creative slowdown. The BIMmer’s block is a condition that similarly ranges in difficulty from coming up with original BIM ideas to being unable to produce any BIM-related work for years.

My symptoms experienced have been varying from mild disinterest to engage in BIM related topics to argumentatively aggressive outburst against good natured BIM promoters.

A heavy cloak of BIM-apathy has permanently set up camp on my shoulders and I’ve been carrying a murky bubble of antagonistic anti BIM-energy everywhere I go, ready to suck in the unaware.

Signs have been there for a while, that I was likely to hit some sort of a BIM-bottom.

That, after 2 decades of meager success achieved at very high personal-price paid, my enthusiasm and willingness to fight for yet-another BIM related pie-in the sky scheme will run out, was somewhat inevitable.

Some people concerned with my wellbeing seeing my difficulties have been trying to get me back into a positive BIM-shape.

They share with me, what they perceive to be signs of things changing for the better. 

The mandating of BIM by various clients, governments, countries. The rise in demand for well-skilled BIM modelers. The improvements felt in overall industry BIM literacy. The financial success of various BIM-related vendors.

I remain unconvinced.

Not only for my deeply set-in cynicism but because what I see out in the ‘real world’.

In my self- forced retirement from BIM evangelism, I make my living in a fairly pedestrian AEC role. One company I engage with regularly claims to be at the forefront of BIM (just as most companies I come across do, interestingly enough).

Regularly, high level managers of this ‘top shelf engineering company’ ensure me (and the world) that they use BIM on everything they do.

Yet, daily I fight my battle with the staff of the same company grumbling about the work necessary to update the ‘date and revision’ of (admittedly and unnecessarily) large number of drawings on the project we share and lament about the time needed to create PDF files from their DWGs.

One might say, these two things, a supposedly very advanced BIM capability and a manual, drawing-date editing system can live side by side in a perfect harmony and within one company.

In line with the ‘horses for courses’ analogy. Or due to the company undergoing an evolutionary process of gradual improvement that caters for various extremes.

I remain unconvinced.

It is like saying, we use super-duper fast vehicles on all our projects, except on yours, there we carry things on foot at large distances, by choice. Or because you did not want to pay for the mark-up that was supposedly a cheaper-faster more efficient way of doing things.

During my 2 decades of swimming upstream in this BIM-resistant, AEC industry river, I floated numerous ideas that never become real – realities.

An online consenting system for building permits, a construction-site located central information pod, the picture book documenting concept, the forensic BIM support for claims and generally risk management, the model of the paper free construction…  just to name some of the numerous incarnations of innovative BIM use I promoted.

Having given up on most of those – time to set up the ‘Hit by the BIM-block club?

A scary thought.