A good question from Simon.
What were your first ideas for explaining ’BIM’ to somebody, and did they pass the test of time?
My first ideas in the ‘90s about ‘BIM’, before it was called ‘BIM’, were:
- Excitment. Is ‘excitement’ an idea? Maybe. What was I excited about though?
- Specifically, that I could represent my mental model of a design project as a digital model. That the digital model supplements the mental model, helps me see and examine it thoroughly, and helps me formulate it. Right? The mental model is not fully formed in an instant. It takes time, a lot of time, to formulate it. It begins, nascent, then develops over time as we scrutinize it, look at it, think about it.
- Also excitement from the automation of my technical drawings, construction drawings, their graphics derived from the digital model. Why was I excited about this? Two reasons.
- One, because of the derivative function, because the drawings flow FROM the model, consistency — — among mental and digital model AND the narrowed expressions of articulate attentive focus or visual close study (VCS), the technical drawings — is maintained by the basic nature of the workflow.
- But that was secondary. The VCS expressions (the drawings) are a lens through which I LOOK AT the model to understand it more than superficially. Model complexity increases and pretty early on in development surpasses human interpretive power and cognitive grasp. I NEED adequate equipment for LOOKING (at the model), to think about it, coherently, effectively, to think at all, really..
Joe Magas asks:
Good answers from Gavin Crump in the comments. I just add, look here https://tangerinefocus.com/2023/10/24/model-automation-and-model-quality-on-a-graph/ scroll down just a bit, at a model I built in 2007 (I’d done similar since 1998) and below that the construction drawings that we automated 100% from that model. I mean, 99.9% of the drawing graphics of 100% of the drawings in the set of drawings are automated from that model, except dimensions and notes.
That’s a lot of detailed modeling done and done very carefully. Click on the caption under the drawing images to download and zoom in on each sheet to verify that.
How did we make models like that?
It was a combination of 2 people, one my business partner who was a very good architect and the other was me who took on modeling with the manic devotion of some kind of fanatic driven to PROVE that modeling would be what I said it would be and willing to work unlimited hours without regard to health or sanity or any other concerns to prove it. But, it doesn’t prove anything like what I thought it would prove.
If you want models better than that, good luck but luck is not enough. Ultimately there is something very wrong with the whole idea. Which I’ve tried to address, once and now a second time: https://tangerinefocus.com
The first time I tried to address it, I got hired at a software company to lead development of the automated fusion of all the drawings in-situ within the model, which you see in the video. https://tangerinefocus.com/tgn/earlier-media-innovations/
If I had had that fusion when building the model that made the drawings, that would have greatly improved vision for everyone looking at the quality of both model and drawings and their consistency during their development and at handover. And I could have been less fanatical about modeling and more effective at making things clear at the same time.
8 other companies that I know of followed with their own version of the automated drawing-model fusion after that, including Revizto. Among Revizto users in CM the fusion is among the most popular useful features.
I now propose a second generation of this fusion and evolution of what VCS visual close study expressions look like in models. An open source dev project is now started that might bring this to everyone in every modeling software. Announcements later this spring are coming: https://tangerinefocus.com/visual-engagement-with-modeled-worlds/
For later reference I capture some of the comments under the linkedin post:
More fusion: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLAiyamA5WoZbdfVlrOFLbrgF8AEyi2Fma&si=iTh_2MaUqWemgJH4
OPEN VCS, a lens for looking at models 