June 2013

Attendees: Alexandra Fenton Bergin, Michael Bergin, Dave Bleiman, Mario Guttman, Bruce Madsen, Danny Polkinhorn, Wafaa Sabil, Karen Thomas, Marla Ushijima, Willard Williams

1. Grasshopper - design as a parametric process
2. Building Analytics:
• mining data from the BIM
• QC - BIM auditing firm-wide
• strategic planning
3. Simulation/daylight studies: work by architects usually for LEED, lightweight; real analysis by consultants
4. CASE recently did a project to develop a firm-wide content library pulled from content already existing in the firm's projects. They found 20,000 families with over 645,000 instances. They used Microsoft Access to mine views and nested families, prioritizing the most-used families.
5. Would it be feasible to cross-reference and index families across all projects to view them in their native context?
6. Key issue with content libraries is who's reviewing the information?
7. "We have tools to pull data; we need tools to understand it." We need better tools for visualizing data.
8. BIM still used mostly for geometry clash detection and 2D drawings, which is an evolutionary dead-end. The end client will be builders and subs for fabrication. Evolution is coming from both ends, but subs throw out design models because designers don't know what's needed for construction purposes. It remains that models are built for different purposes which are not always compatible.
9. Why do firms hire consultants for I.T. development?
• They tend not to trust their in-house experts or want to get a fresh perspective.
• Value of consultants is NOT to come in and tell people what to do; they must help get work or do work/be more productive, such as creating specialized tools.
• Viewpoint of upper management is to brand firm as being ahead of the curve, to help win work.
10. What will our profession look like in 20-30 years?
• either be gone or much different?
• next generation will not be producing drawings, they'll be producing data
• design/build?