fashion. As an industry, we may have adopted 3D models, but we still seem to be slaves to 2D, all while leveraging decades old single-core software. Martyn Day: I remember Revit before the BIM term was created. Why did the BIM idea blossom, and why do you think it became so central to the industry? Richard Harpham: As soon as Revit was acquired, Autodesk internally wrestled to position it as something different to their existing CAD and 3D solutions. Fundamentally, AutoCAD, Architectural Desktop and Revit were all built to deliver coordinated documentation. Users found it easy to see how Revit greatly improved drawing coordination, but just being better at delivering drawings was a very limiting market position. So, the Autodesk team created a new term, Building Information Modelling, specifically to better position Revit’s capability to host data. I remember there was debate about using the term Single Building Model (SBM), already widely used for 3D building models, but that term had heavy association with Graphisoft. After a lot of marketing effort, the BIM term became adopted by some of the more rebellious technologists in large AE firms, with a key moment being a presentation of how BIM was used for the Freedom Tower in New York. Then, almost overnight, any serious architect technologist had to explain their BIM strategy to their firm’s partners, and the first BIM managers started to appear. BIM was a competitive separator for forward thinking firms and was used extensively to promote their technical prowess at delivering modern design services. Remarkably, this BIM centricity has pervaded almost every aspect of AEC technology development since, both inside firms and in software developers. But, during the last few years, I’m seeing the generally accepted premise, that a ‘BIM’ should be the data core during building production, is now being challenged. Many now argue that it has become more of a millstone than an enabler. Martyn Day: Do you think focusing on BIM may be the wrong approach? 28
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Richard Harpham: I’d rather not say it’s wrong to utilise BIM, just that it needs to be positioned as one of many contextual sources that can be leveraged during building production. A single project BIM, where all project data must append to a single 3D model, almost never happens, and each profession ends up creating their own 3D model due to contractual risk or lack of trust. That, combined with the sheer file size issues of a centralised BIM, has us searching for software to solve collaboration challenges that do little to advance productivity. This issue of BIM collaboration has created a ‘throttle’ in maintaining the
One from the archives: the term BIM really took off in 2005 when Revit was used for New York’s Freedom Tower
pace of workflows during building production, which usually means information ‘falls out of 3D’ into 2D documentation to keep pace with the project. Martyn Day: I don’t think you are saying much new there about today’s issues, but what are you now focusing at Slate on to address the bigger problems? Richard Harpham: We’ve spent considerable time speaking to firms that are
overwhelmed by their digital data, including BIM, finding surprisingly little of it is being used during critical decision processes. We’ve also proven that simply digitising our legacy processes, as most current construction software does, is not providing the productivity returns we’d hoped for. We may be at an important watershed moment, where existing and trusted methods, based on a human’s cognitive abilities, may have reached their limit. The team who formed Slate became increasingly interested in better understanding how our legacy processes and decision-making habits might hold the answers to improved software design. Numerous studies have proven that humans generally focus more when trying to avoid losses than find gains, sticking to the original plan whenever possible. This decision bias, when multiplied over weeks and months of decisions during building production, crushes most attempts to improve productivity. Almost every software tool out there is trying to keep you on the original schedule or minimise change as it could increase costs. In AEC, we have inadvertently taught ourselves and our software that change is something to be avoided, as we can’t predict how good or bad a change might be. We experience similar illogical human behaviour in everyday life, where someone might say, “I know there is a new road that is bound to be faster to the shops, but I’ve always driven this route, as I know the way and how long it takes.” Of course, most of us now trust the software in our car or smartphone that suggests ‘change opportunities’ all the time like ‘take the next exit for a faster route to avoid Traffic.’ GPS software is built to predict and imply positive change opportunities. You still get to decide whether to take the advice, but at least you now know. Martyn Day: So, you are implying this is a process design problem, and we need to move away from trusted methods that have worked in the past? Richard Harpham: Well, in almost every other human industrial endeavour, we are moving towards more agile context driven decision processes that www.AECmag.com
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