Friday, January 14, 2011

Do we need to work on larger desks or expand our minds?

I am getting interesting ‘offline’ comments. Many choose to ‘sit on the fence’ and wait and see.
I must not be ungrateful – the support of this blog has been excellent, albeit largely invisible to outsiders.
I talked previously about the irony of CAD managers (preventing ‘Flatcad grow up and move on’) being put in charge to herald in the ‘new’ (BIM) approach;
There is another paradox the industry can claim:
Buildings get documented by building documenters.
Generally they work in offices and on computers placed on modestly sized desks.
Should not matter much – we work in virtual environment, where even Flatcad provides endless space to document entire cities in infinite detail and 1:1 scale.
A scroll-mouse is needed and a flat screen and there is a pleasant working environment.
Wait on – there is another part of this communication story: the outputs; These are controlled by two forces – one is a combination of contractual requirements and lack of understanding of processes the other governed by economy and size preference; So, we output everything on A1 sheets as well as A3s (same information reduced);
A1s because we have to and A3s because they are cheap to reproduce and fit onto our desks.
Why are we basing an entire industry’s communication on information provided in such bad shape?
I’ll tell you about A3 based ‘picture book documenting’ tomorrow.





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