My friend, DjG shared a promo on FB a couple of days ago
(link at the bottom of this post) that made me stop and read it with interest.
Now this is my kind of a phone!
Interesting self-revelation, as everyone knows I’m not
much into gadgets, the length I hang onto my old dumb Nokia is probably only rivalled
by my dear friends in India. Currently I’m nursing a 3 year old Blackberry,
hoping to last the year out without having to learn to get by with a newer
version of it.
What tickled my fancy was not the list of unique features
this device offered but the fact that it was mothered by Caterpillar and is
looking ‘construction cool’.
In spite of the huge amount of money sloshing within the construction
field globally, it is not a ‘cool career choice’ and consequently not the ‘sharpest’
of industries. The higher one goes up the food-chain of it, the thinner the ‘air’
gets – as my personal encounters with many heavy hitters of the industry over
the last 2 decades have proven.
The whole ‘BIM thing’ has been trying to change this
trend, entice the elite of the young thinkers, the cream of the technology
developers and together shake the industry through innovation into a new, cool force
to reckon with.
Unfortunately, this ‘BIM thing’ has been anything but
successful. After good 2 decades of momentous efforts and moneys spent, the
industry still is a boring old slog-for daily survival for the most working in
it and an easy dirty road to the riches for a very small minority manipulating
within it.
Over the years I have written a lot, on why the currently
available (and often mandated) mainstream BIM is doomed to fail and will not repeat
myself again. I will pull out one factor though to illustrate the hope a
possible alternative might show:
The extremely low percentage of hands-on involvement on any
working BIM measured across the project (or company claiming to be BIM enabled);
Simply saying – on a ‘BIM project’ how high a percentage
of the people involved can claim to be able to make ‘real, hands-on’ use of the
employed BIM approach?
10%, 20%, 90%?
The emphasis is on the ‘real’. Not forced, not pretended,
not indirect, not….
Real.
Like, ‘it is part of my work and I can handle it by
myself and it is a meaningful tool for me’.
I am pretty confident, that even the biggest of biggest
of BIMmest of projects currently have a percentage in low single figures, especially
if you bring in the construction end of those building.
That could be changed with a 4-step process:
Make the project truly paper free, make Caterpillar
phones the official phones of the project, put Adobe into charge of all the
data outputs (2D, 3D, 4D…) and link everything to a central model built by and
on ArchiCAD.
Not only will this model grow into a global industry
success, it would make it cool for young and old too!
