It is not about the drawing, it is about the model.

Well, guess what? It is about neither; it is all about the building.

It is cool to talk about “BIM as Disruptive Technology” these days.

Wise commentators dampen their predictions by saying “BIM has the potential” but there are also many that label Revit as DT.

A relatively new creation of a jargon, DT can be defined in numerous ways (check the Net) –

I don’t see any of the current approaches to BIM, let alone any software packages to meet the criteria to qualify.

As scary as it would be for many for the ‘drawing’ to disappear from the process suddenly, I’d still say it would not be DT – just a bit of yesterday’s news.

Would result in a bit of re-juggling of current players and all would be business as usual.

But what if design and documentation as we know it disappeared?

What if you could do buildings straight away?

Say, you went to a housing warehouse and on the basis of your likes and dislikes, needs and budget a building was put together straight away for you – then placed on a truck and shipped to your site?

You need a skyscraper, a hospital, a boarding school a factory?

Similar approach. In time, cut the shipping out too and do it remotely, straight on the site.

Now, that I’d call BIM as Disruptive Technology.

 

The final word on the Staircase Exercise

Let me put the staircase to rest.

But not until I make a couple of additional comments about the exercise:

There were 20 clocks in the staircase, and yes, you could’ve come up with that number based purely on the 2D projections. (not many people did);

My main motivation for creating this little PDF was to explore the question of ‘spatial interpretation’.

While people outside the AEC industry often confess to having problems reading plans – this almost never happens within the circles I work in, i.e. no construction professional has yet admitted to me that s/he finds it challenging to interpret construction drawings based purely on 2D (orthogonal) projections (many often acuse their peers to suffer from this).

Still, I wanted to be open to the idea that everyone in the industry IS very good at reading plans (elevations, sections) – so based on that assumption, I was interested to see if there was a measurable time difference between the two methods of interpreting a spatial task.

The results, I’m afraid to say, are inconclusive.

They point to the entire project being a bit ill-conceived and definitely not described clearly enough.

Gives you an idea while I had not done that well in academia in the past – have the passion and drive, not the patience to work methodically through the data.

Chalk it up to experience.

https://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&pid=explorer&chrome=true&srcid=0B4GF8MRLb0DANmI5NDFlN2MtZWNkOS00MWVmLTkyNTYtZWM4MjljZTI3OGRm&hl=en_GB

Why is it not more interactive?

My best friend’s parents worked for a Newspaper company.

(not a News Agency, 40+ years ago, an old fashioned, daily newspaper);

Her mother was a typist, father a type-setter, we occasionally visited the offices and the printing floor.

Apart from all the juicy gossips we picked up – I got to know the fascinating journey of the ‘news’ from the journalist, through the typist, the corrector over the typesetter, some other technical people, into the printing machine, out to the truck – off to the news-booth, sold to the reader.

Nowadays my friend gets her news on her iphone.

Not quite instantly as it is being created (though almost).

What happened to people like my best friend’s parents staffing the newspaper creation industry? Where did those professions go? Did some of them retrain? Jump to a different job?

Or had they all just retired and no new ones were hired?

How come the construction industry is not following suit?

Why does the documentation of a house (for example) follow the voyage not dissimilar to the old fashioned newspaper even in these days?

From the designer to the drafter to the large printer to the client...and why do RFIs tour through longwinded labyrinths before they reach someone that is obliged to respond?

Why is the design not more often delivered on phones?

Why is it not more interactive? 

How many Teklas will it take to change the Construction Light-bulb?

... and what if this Light-bulb does not want to change?

Went to the Tekla roadshow BIM-day today and was pleasantly surprised.

No, it was not just a sale pitch though sometime I wish it was.

I go to events like the one today and think: how many other industries are forced to create ‘the need’ before they can start selling ‘the solution’?

Why is so much effort necessary to go into starting from the basics every time?

Feels a bit like being a logistics business operator and getting hoarded into one room with others to have airplanes sold to.

The sellers spend a huge amount of time on explaining why flying planes would be better for us to driving trucks and very little time on why we should be buying their particular aircraft.

One may say, there is no harm in this, bring everyone up to the same level.

Raising general awareness, it is called. Educating the industry.

Not sure of this strategy, really. Seems a bit like a loose-loose situation.

If I am a truck operator only starting to be looking at the sky there will be a long time before I’d start choosing the right plane to fly.

On the other side, if I had been flying planes for a while – show me the engine, tell me the speed – talk my language!

The sixth category: BIM as a parasite

The problem with writing daily is the urge to start each post with ‘the biggest problem...’

Surely when it comes to an area of one’s interest there is a finite number of ‘biggest problems’ and continuing to introduce new ones lessens credibility.

Oh, well...May adopt Graham’s strategy and use the “one of the...” approach;

BIMologists of various kinds must wonder sometimes if their role is not a bit parasitical.

Deriving nutrients from the host giving not much back in return.

I marvel about this often. A sign of my insecurity? Not really.

If anything I am sometimes over confident of what I bring to my ‘host’.

Which means I am no longer a parasite, or am I?

Then there is the acronym. You can hardly be a good BIMmer without having your own twist on the acronym.

Flatcad was first called CAD/CAM (Computer Aided Drafting and Manufacture) then it lost the CAM when Architecture started to claim ownership, but added another D for Design. (CADD);

BIM was not always BIM either. First it was VC (Virtual Construction) but silly Graphisoft trademarked it and put most users off using it – so BIM became BIM (Building Information Modelling) for better or worse – before it got another M – for Management, I guess sounds more sophisticated...

My suggestion: Put two little ‘m’s in front of BIM

Meaningful and measurable

Can’t knock the Archicad Marquee off its pedestal

When it comes to the popularity of my posts. And you know what one comes second?

The one on the Revit Conference. Considering how much I wanted to stick to software neutrality when I embarked on this little venture, I’m not doing that great.

There is something else that bothers me these days: “innovation”

The word that used to trouble me most in English once was ‘hero’.

How sports people, pop stars and celebrities were awarded the label plainly annoyed.

Then gradually ‘innovation’ and ‘innovative’ replaced hero and became my antiheroes.

Specially in relation to construction.

Somehow, the industry got stuck in reverse gear and is unable to move forward.

To counter balance that, anyone that attempts to do anything beyond the ordinary quickly gains the brand of being an innovator.

The misuse of the word makes me shiver. Then I read on the net:

“It is more and more accepted that innovation does not come without a conscious decision to innovate.”

Really? Do people wake up in the morning and say, ‘today, I’m going to innovate?'

Others tell me: I’d been ahead of my time. For twenty years now.

Still, I can’t remember ever consciously embarking on innovating; 

Fixing things up, making them better, absolutely.

But, my father would call this tinkering, messing about.

“Innovation” is such a loaded word. Let’s stick to tinkering.

Does your BIM translate into a specific colour?

It is surprising that in a field so highly contested by a number of strong, international (global) players there is a lack of external branding for the disciples.

Something that would easily differentiate a Revit follower from a Vectorworks user, an Archicad fan from a GT enthusiast or Bentley buff.

A colour, a piece of clothing, a haircut?

In my quests to accumulate enough CPD points annually to keep my registration going in NZ, I often attended NZIA gatherings. With over 500 architects in one place I used to keep myself awake on some of the low-octane lectures by guessing the delegates colours, i.e. what was their CAD of choice. Not scientific at all, just fun.

Things get a bit more complicated when you start self-branding by other BIM categories, whether you supported IFC or not, believed in-or dismissed IPD, and if you belonged to the group of BIM-evolutionists or rather sided with the ones that chuck an R in front of evolution? 

You could easily end up like a Rubik cube yourself.

This brings me to another question, quite unique to this field: why are there no software specific gadgets being used to solidify market presence?

Why no significant alliances between any of the BIM software providers and those that make the paraphernalia designed to consume the fruits of their BIM?

Ignorance or arrogance?

Want to do well in BIM: run a tight and skinny model.

My daughter asked me yesterday: “At what point are you going to debunk something in your debunkthebim blog?”

Hmmmmm...

A quarter down into my year-long journey and I managed to create one reader that questions the entire endeavour;

At least she is responding...

So let’s put one issue straight today:

You want to get in/thrive in BIM – you need to be thrifty!

You need to run a tight and skinny model.

The overall success of any BIM endeavour will depend majorly on how well the digital model and is management is managed.

In the earlier days of CAD, file size meant everything and ‘purge’ was the mantra.

Nowadays no matter how good hardware/software one has – every element and tool has to be optimised to run at the lowest complexity possible with the smallest size acceptable.

It is a culture that should be introduced early on and everyone trained to respect it.

Often relying on self moderation will not be sufficient and you’ll need to police it.

You only need one person in your team to ‘innovate’ and introduce an object that is not optimised and it will slowly or even rapidly kill your model.

But having a slow (or dead) model is not the only disadvantage of an un-optimised BIM workflow -  the flow-on effects are numerous and they all can damage your bottom line.

Please don’t clean up my wall intersections...

I should start with a disclaimer: I model in Archicad 13;

That is whenever I need to assess something quickly and am not constrained by other project-needs nor the limitations of the software itself.

So, what I am about to write may no longer be an issue in Archicad 14, nor the other modelling packages people use.

It is an issue for me, because I use Archicad 13.

It is to do with how walls clean-up where they intersect with each other.

They seem to have an overriding wish to conform to the aesthetics of the drawing – i.e. they automatically clean-up into a nice, tidy, seamless intersection.

Petty that construction in real life is rarely as tidy.

So, next disclaimer: I model stuff for construction.

Archicad is meant to be an architectural software – so why get so hung up on this trivial issue?

Education of the masses is on the agenda of most BIMutopist I meet in my daily work.

 Would it not make sense to have the building modelling software used to resolve and document (if not construct) behave in a way that is closer to reality and not driven by the look of the drawing?

I know, you’ll tell me that would be too constraining on design.

I on the other side see another opportunity for building material supplies to softly-ambush the field.

* PS – I do know how to get around this by having walls on different layers and adding the layer names different ‘priority’ numbers; And I know architects want them to be this way...

Still, my argument stays, the process is not reality-friendly it is drawing-look driven;

April fool’s joke-post: Staircase analysed (Part 1)

I was going to write an April fool’s joke-post for today;

Something outrageous and funny. Something to do with BIM.

Then, I thought of my staircase exercise. Now, there is a joke for you, a joke on me.

Ok, the exercise failed and did not go around the world. Too bad.

Can’t quite share the end results with you as yet,

they are still rapidly coming in at the rate of .... wait for it

...1 per week.

Today, I’ll respond to those that directly or indirectly questioned what my point was anyway.

I had multiple points.

First is to do with the 2D - projections part.

I wanted to raise awareness of the difficulties we all have with reading plans and sections.

Most of us can (or claim to be able) to do it well.

Really? Let’s look at this example again:

There is a 3D space (real or imagined). To convey this space fully through 2D projections, for every (and I emphasise every) element of this space we have to provide 2, correctly prepared orthogonal projections. A bit like shown on the pictures here.

To understand the 2, orthogonal projections, in our heads, we need to reverse the process and build every (!) elements up from 2 different views. Doable, yes;

But, is this really a technique worth sticking to at any cost?

These pictures can be downloaded as a (flat) PDF from here:

https://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&pid=explorer&chrome=true&srcid=0B4GF8MRLb0DAM2YzNTBkNmMtYWUyMC00NTRjLWE0ZDItYzA4NzUwNmQ3NTE3&hl=en_GB