I’ve got the feeling that BIM is about to go on the backburner again...

...As ‘things’ are getting tougher still in the AEC-world.

While not particularly looking forward to more uncertainties lurking around my job-status, project-prospects and generally the industry, taking the spotlight-off BIM for a while would suit me just fine.

Let the market do its ‘thing’ for a while and see where we would get.

I AM very-much in favour of letting BIM off the leash, and out on its own.

If it works, great – if not, then we know we’ve been barking up the wrong tree.

There surely are many others shearing the idea that there are only so many excuses we can swallow on the subject of BIM’s failure before it gets boring.

Yes, clients should be asking for it. No, they are not. Why?

Because they don’t know that they should be wanting it or just do not care (i.e. unconvinced of the benefits);

Consultants aren’t playing ball and don’t use open BIM. So, they can get away with it?

Contractors are slow on the uptake and only just working out what the BIM acronym is? Subcontractors are not even aware of the acronym’s existence just heard somewhere that AutoCAD was no longer the standard for shop drawings? Or is it?

This is your risk, or advantage, or whatever.

Deal with it! Or let be dealt by it, so we can all move on.

I once worked for an architect that tortured his clients.

Not in the physical sense, of course, he used subtle methods, like pitting them against their own builders, changing his designs on the fly and in the last minutes of construction, specifying materials unnecessarily expensive and hard-to-maintain and by not turning up at pre-arranged meetings.

He charged them exuberant fees and his projects were always late, the delays measured in years, he mocked them publicly and kept an unlocked-backdoor to his office to sneak out when they turned up unexpectedly.

And they kept coming back to him.

These clients, or if not them personally, their family, friends, competitors, enemies.

He was the darling of the industry, come to think of it, he still is.

He taught me one of the most valuable work-related lessons in life:

‘The building is not important, people love getting a bargain’.

His clients, sitting at the well-off end of the range, valued their bargains a bit differently than, say little-kitchen-renovation-clients would, or school-client boards-of-trustees.

For them the bargain was the ‘national award’ the building was likely-to win, the invitation to the architectural institute’s dinner, being considered an ‘enlightened architectural client’, the envy of the neighbours, the prestige.

I since learned that this ‘pursuit for the bargain’ is absolutely universal, yet strategically so often ignored by key building-project participants.

If you think BIM has nothing to do with this, think again!

A day full of Colours... I had last Thursday...

...though the power of colours is surprisingly lost on many when it comes to communication...

First: I’ve tried explaining the umpteenth time to my, otherwise sharp-and-enthusiastic teammate, that presenting everything grey in a construction-model is not that good a practice.

He was nodding weakly while I rattled examples, where depicting beams in orange, columns in blue and hollow-core-panels in olive-green was totally justified, but I knew he was not convinced.

His eyes drifted uncontrollable through the window, out to the site, where an army of little, glow-yellow-vested men was fashioning our building out-of grey beams, grey columns, grey slabs reinforced with grey bars...

Then, I went home to our girls’ interim school-progress reports to inspect.

Presented as tables showing subjects, criteria and grades on the scale of 1-3 (translated into letters) this communication pleasantly surprised me by its simplicity.

(Especially when I contrast it with the barrage of digital-information the school unleashes on us daily, since they’ve discovered the internet.)

Yet, the colours were missing. Printed on a white sheet, the stamp on the bottom is green, the signature blue, the writing, the table are black.

Wouldn’t it be beneficial to have the three grades represented by colours? I’d think so.

Use the well-tested colours of the traffic-lights for impact.

Colour printing expensive? Maybe, but is it worth not-to use it here? Value vs. Risk?

I have a twisted little story.....that I can’t resist to share.

Imagine this: A building yet-to-be built. (can’t really give you pictures due to confidentiality but this should not take away from the story as the numbers talk here better than most pictures would);

Commercial high-rise, numerous basements, podium, a split tower with a dozen or-so floors.

My interest is still at the bottom basement level.

There are 114 columns to this floor.

There are 47 grids to provide the spatial framework to the structuring of these columns.

NONE (0, zero) of these columns are based on the intersection of two gridlines. A few are ‘close’ (as in sitting on a grid or in reasonable proximity to one, many are floating totally ‘loose’.)

Interested in more statistics? The 114 columns are made up of 31 (thirty-one) individual types, the maximum occurrence any of the types is afforded is 15, there are 12 types with only one representative for each.

Standardisation? What standardisation?

The ‘twist’ of the story is not in these numbers, though I find them quite entertaining. (and a lot of work,  mind you).

The punch-line comes from IFC – as in the exchange format of the buildingSMART fame, the enabler of the ‘open BIM’, I’m ‘practicing’ on this job

No matter how I convert the source (Revit) file into the ‘ifc’ format, 4 out of the 114 columns come across rotated by a random angle.

Autodesk may have coined ‘BIM’ but its heart has never been in it...

It may have spent huge amount of money on acquiring Revit and then developing it into something presentable and may be constantly pumping funds into its marketing-machine worldwide to promote BIM, Autodesk never really believed it to be the future, and this shows.

Akin to a politician half-heartedly supporting a policy launch he never agreed-with in the first place, or a teenager holding a candle at his sister’s confirmation-ceremony yet hopes, none of his mates see him like this, Autodesk has been sending out ‘invisible signals’ to the world, that this ‘BIM thing’ is all a bit beneath it and will not last, anyway.

The danger of ‘invisible’ anything is though that it may not get noticed by the ones aimed at, and come judgment day, when the whole ‘BIM thing’ falls over, and the time to re-populate the world with the tried-and-loved AutoCAD suites dawns again, some of the old followers may have moved on.

Unfortunately, the routes disillusioned AutoCAD fans currently can take up are few and badly marked.

Still, would not bet on this situation to continue till the ‘judgment day’ when they can happily re-join the Autodesk clan.

My guess is, that those millions of AutoCAD users around the world that have been cultivated over the last 20-years will yet come back to bite Autodesk in one way, or other.

A newcomer to BIM? Thinking of making a career of it?

Let me give you one advice: Think again!

It may look at first like an undiscovered nice, niche-area within an overcrowded field.

A sound system of utilising technology and best practice information management for the advancement of all.  

A natural marriage of the new and old, a harmonious unison between science and practice.

An easy fix to a terminally ill industry, a lifeline to floundering, aging professionals that have lost their edge and focus. Also an exciting career path for the professionally freshly hatched.

A good business plan, a ‘no brainer’ as I often hear.

I blame the internet for this one. And the software vendors. And the academia.

The three together have managed to stitch up a nice little fairy-tale that seems to be doing its repeated rounds over the various levels of the AEC industry.

It looks real and credible while behaving no better than any old pyramid-scheme or hot-air-balloon scam.

To strengthen its power, this scary threesome targets the young and the old within the field, the nerdy and the vulnerable, the ambitious and the disillusioned. It has a custom created story for each, to hook them up, enlist in their army and let them do the dirty work for the cause.

Look, if it looks too good to be true, IT IS. Full stop!

If really interested in BIM, dig deeper!

Sharing means caring...

The two teenage-girls were ready for a party, minus a Hermione tie yet to be fashioned around the neck of one of them.

They came to me for help, I directed them to the ‘Fred-how-tie’ I gifted my husband last Christmas (pictured) but the static nature of the instructions made them look for a better alternative.

They went to Youtube.

Obvious choice. Would it be the same for you?

If you had to clean a laptop, replace a knob on the oven or create a macramé hanging plant holder, would your first place to look for instruction be the Youtube?

Or would you Google it first?

That’d be un-cool, according to the 15 year olds.

Let’s not make this post of another litany of generational-differences, instead:

I do have an interest in sharing instructions for this-and-that on the net (mostly manufacturer’s product installations) and feel like asking the following question routinely:

Why is sharing PDFs online so difficult?

Search for answers and you get many tips on how to ‘send’ PDF’s to someone else.

I’m interested in using a PDF online, with all its clever features and without needing to download any viewers or the file itself.

Sharing, as in using something jointly as opposed to in turns.

Sharing, as in letting somebody else in-on the same information as opposed to just keeping to oneself.

“I’d rather go out of business than make my guys draw their own org-charts”

Is the message I’m getting. And don’t get too smug thinking it is a ‘cultural’ thing or applies to my workplace only.

Nor is it geographically specific, if anything, it is a pretty universal phenomenon.

Business owners around the world give this message out daily to hundreds of thousands of mid-level engineers (AND architects, and construction managers, and planners, and...) as they turn a blind eye to this practice of ‘false delegation’.

In the past I used all sorts of more-and-less clever analogies to describe this system of ‘second hand information perusal’, – from needing to be driven by someone else to get anywhere to ...well, can’t quite recall any of the others but am sure they were numerous – I’m known for ample uses of clichés and truisms within my blogs.

When you look at any of these cases individually, they are harmless: An engineer instructs a draftsman to draw up his design, a planner another to create a PP. A mid manager requests hundreds of tender plans printed off, another a range of variations to the org-chart (from the title) to be coloured up in all shades of the rainbow.

Trust me, these are the seeds of a lot-of-trouble, yet to come for your company.

Understand what matters...make the changes necessary...

‘Screw it, let’s do it!’ - to quote Sir R Branson of Virgin fame.

When is a discrepancy not really a discrepancy?

They both are confident to be following well established building-documenting practices.

The structural engineer sizes the concrete column; the architect places it in the space. There is a code on the structural drawing that can be tracked to the schedule and the dimensions are noted. The architectural plan neatly sets out the column’s centre point from two nearby, perpendicular grids.

Then comes the eager BIM modeller and screams with joy as she overlays the see-through plans on her digital light-table: A discrepancy! The columns are not aligned on the two images, out by a bit.

She writes an RFI! (or a query with a proprietary, fancy name).

Hate to take the wind out from under her wings, but this technically IS not a discrepancy, let alone clash. Obviously we are dealing with the results of a non-model based documentation and a slightly stroppy CAD work, but viewing the outputs from the creation of the virtual model representation of the building, neither the architect nor the structural engineer have blundered.

You don’t often hear me straightforward release the above mentioned consultants of their responsibilities for less then adequate work, the reason I’m doing it today is to highlight a silly practice that is spreading amongst those that are supposedly are DOING BIM.

The practice of lead-balloon RFI’s.

Sorry, they are waste of time, do not fly.

“I just don’t really understand what’s the point using this?”

Asks Gergely, who I presume to be a ‘model purist’.

...and good on him for standing up for something as noble as that.

My intentions are generally much murkier than his (I guess) as I try to force the 3D and 2D into one environment and get them to talk to each other more directly than the orthogonal views of various packages will let them.

This little-battle is between Archicad and me –

I repeatedly ignore the creators’ hints to use the product in-a-certain-way and force it ‘kicking and screaming’ to perform tasks I dream-up.

Tasks, the program generally feels to be beneath-it, degrading even – which amuses me, considering I know lot of people that still use it purely for 2D-drafting.

Now, that I’d call humiliating for a modelling program of any colour but I guess, we all have our standards, and GS/Archicad seem to be less worried about the practice of broken sections and 2D lines as long as they are ‘architectural’.

On the other hand, applying it to construction modelling and 3D/2D coordination (within one, spatial view) appears to be perceived as heresy if not outright abuse of the program.

To answer Gergely’s question: the point is to compare a 3D AND a 2D representation of a space within one environment;

The two info-packages are usually prepared by different parties.

Makes sense to me.

Gergely’s original post is here:

http://www.linkedin.com/groups/question-Archicad-developers-what-is-796267.S.76666060?qid=9d7cee6c-9628-4623-a20b-0e9a481ade18&trk=group_most_popular-0-b-cmr&goback=%2Egmp_796267