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?

May 2013

Attendees: Dave Bleiman, Karen Thomas, Marla Ushijima

Major Topics:

Use of ipads, personal vs. company property. 16GB sufficient for business; individuals might want to upgrade. Wifi vs. cellular data/tether? - perhaps only principals, or in the field. Who pays for the data? Monthly stipend?

Lots of good apps out now. We shared some favorites:

• Penultimate for sketching
• Notability for recording mixed media notes - typed, audio, sketch
• Dropbox
• Sharefile
• iAnnotate
• Keynote
• Bluebeam

Rutherford & Chekene uses pdfs on ipads for marketing. Can be shown either on the tablet itself or connected to a larger display or projector.

April 2013

Attendees: Dave Bleiman, Catherine Chan,
Craig Goings, Bruce Madsen, Karen Thomas, Dan Tsui, Marla Ushijima

Major Topics:
Newforma
File sharing

March 2013

Attendees: Luis Buenfil, Bruce Madsen, Guillaume Miara, Sheena Shook, Karen Thomas, Marla Ushijima

Major topics of discussion:

BIM strategy services offered by small, agile consultants (such as Case, Ant Group, Ecodomus, Kimon Onuma) to design firms and owners.

Cobie data: clients hear about it and want it, but client project managers don't want to pay for it.

Particular software is less critical than the process it facilitates.

There's a lack of consistency among firms on BIM deliverables. Everyone in the industry has a duty to push standards forward. BIM makes it more critical.

Contract language is for BIM is critical. Project managers are wary because they're on the hook for money and schedule.

UC Berkeley offers no interdisciplinary training and no Revit. Schools that don't produce good interns with useful skills will drop off. Mentorship is crucial. SF AIA mentorship program offers 360º, cross-firm mentoring connections.

Writing up meeting minutes can be facilitated by audio recording. There's an ipad app that records audio with bookmarks that are tagged to typed notes. Transcription is difficult due to background noise typically present; pretty much has to be done by humans.

February 2013

Attendees: Dave Bleiman, Eric Davis, David Green, Mario Guttman, Mike Hilliard, James MacKenzie, Bruce Madsen, Nancy McClure, Kim Pipkin, Tony Rinella, Adhamina Rodriguez, Gina Siciliano, Madigan Talmadge-Bowers, Vidhya Thyagarajin, Dan Tsui, Marla Ushijima, Glen Walson

 
James McKenzie of Swinerton hosted at Swinerton's offices (thanks, great conference room!), and led a lively discussion on BIM workflow between designers and builders. He drew from his related presentations at Autodesk University on project delivery and best practices for construction data extraction from Revit.

December 2012

Attendees: Dave Bleiman, Luis Buenfil, Bruce Madsen, Dan Tsui, Marla Ushijima

Topics of discussion:

Bruce decried the inconsistency of Revit family naming and expressed a wish for an industry standard. He mentioned the standards for plumbing families developed by ATS.

Dan brought up the database he's creating in SQLite (for his girlfriend's recipe collection).

Python was mentioned as an "awesome, easy, fast" database alternative. Luis says that Python integrates into Revit, and provides integration between Revit and several other programs such as Rhino, Vasari, and 3D Studio. It's open source and offers a graphical interface. It can be used as a front-end for creating geometry from a project program; and multi-variable input facilitates analysis and design optimization.

Luis told us about the flying motorcycles and cage match at the AU keynote speech (!). The main talking points at AU, and the evident direction in which Autodesk is investing, is in cloud computing and mobile solutions, such as visualization in the field on a ipad.

Dave brought up Turkey. Ground displacement in the recent earthquake was 3-4 meters. He mentions that the banking system was isolated from the Lehman Bros. disaster and the economy is fairly healthy. There's a nation-wide push for hospital construction, seismic retrofit and base isolation. Mock-ups of O.R.'s are not economically viable; virtual simulation would be a good substitute.

Virtual simulation benefits from development in the gaming industry (since that's where the money is). Game engines can handle the geometry much better than Revit for smooth, fast walk-throughs. Dan describes a work flow of .rvt file > .3ds > Unity game engine (which is free!). Then that can be run on a desktop, laptop, or ipad to glasses with two screens that cover the eyes; and a helmet with a gyroscope that tracks head movement. Dan mentions that an iphone taped to a hat would alternately serve that function. The model moves as the person looks around and up/down. SmartBIM is apparently backing development of visualization using Unity.

Bruce likens Revit walk-throughs to "packing an elephant into a Volkswagon." There needs to be a converter to simplify the geometry and proximity triggers to select alternate levels of detail for quick walk-throughs. He thinks this needs to be done by a person, as it requires a judgement call. There's a lot of ambiguity that's not handled well by computers.

We ended with a discussion debating the value proposition of paying tuition at current rates to get an MBA.

November Meeting

Attendees: Dave Bleiman, Nora Klebow, Nancy McClure, Guy Messick, Mabe Ng, Bruce Madsen, Raimi Tan, Karen Thomas, Dan Tsui, Marla Ushijima, Glen Walson, Les Young.

Bruce hosted us at HOK this month (thanks, Bruce!). He had a great presentation on "BOB - BIM Outside the Box" and has graciously shared slides from his powerpoint presentation with us. You can download it here.

Bruce was delayed in starting his presentation due to enthusiastic discussion as people were arriving.

Bruce and Glen compared notes on the current state of Revit MEP. HOK now mandates that MEP work be performed in Revit. Interface Engineering has about 120 projects on Revit MEP. They agree that implementation has been difficult, though improving. The software is now adequate for the task, but workflow remains a major issue.

Data remains an ongoing challenge in BIM. Nancy notes that over the life of a project/building, it's difficult to maintain the integrity of the data. While designers don't want to be data-driven, Nancy points out that heavily-programmed buildings can benefit greatly by using data in a BIM design workflow. Nora notes that hospitals are in the forefront of this strategy because while the diagnostic and testing (D+T) components are different every time in terms of various metrics and adjacencies, patient rooms remain similar from project to project. Dave and Glen agree that hospitals benefit the most from evidence-based design because the owners are deeply involved in the design process, which is critical for its success.

Bruce began his presentation by identifying various aspects of implementing BIM and comparing the cost implications of each. While  BIM software is not inexpensive, that direct cost is a small fraction of the overall costs, as shown in his pie chart above. Marla and Karen questioned the slice for coordination since coordination has always been the architect's responsibility, but Bruce and Dave agree that the effort for BIM coordination is significantly greater than what's traditionally been done by architects because it's handled in the earlier phases of the project rather than getting pushed off to the contractor.

The largest single cost of BIM is for the content. The elements of this are building the firm-specific content for templates, building the firm library, acquiring content as needed, and managing all that content. Bruce's presentation focused on acquisition of content: building, finding, and/or buying it.

Built content can be started from a template, or by modifying existing content. Intuition would assume that using existing content would be easier, but as Glen pointed out, between time spent searching, modifying, and reverse-engineering to fix defects, it's often faster and easier to build from scratch.

Free content can be found from a variety of sources:

• BIM box: In addition to the default content provided, Autodesk offers 30 additional regional libraries.
• Within the firm: project archives, firm library, local office library
• Community exchanges: Balda Architect, Beck Group, CADforum, Revit City, Revit Database, Revit Forum, TurboSquid, Woodwork Institute
• Commericial consolidators: ATS, Autodesk SEEK, ARCAT, ARCxl, Bimobject, BIM STOP, Bimstore, CADdetails, Design content, National BIM Library, POLANTIS, PRODUCTSPEC, SteelSelect, Sweets Network, Reed Construction, RevitFAMILIESonline, SMARTBIM
• Manufacturers: Bruce has identified over 1100 manufacturers providing BIM content, with more coming on board every day. He feels that manufacturers are supporting BIM much better/faster than they had CAD.

Dave told us that manufacturers must pay to be listed with Autodesk SEEK, which limits the value of that resource. He also feels that using the National BIM Library is a route to guaranteed failure. Everyone agreed that while there's a lot of free content out there, there's a lot of time and effort required to find and adapt it—which is not free.

Buying content can be done from stores (Archvision, BD GROUP, Designconnected, ENGworks, FORMFONTS, Little Details Count, Revit Content, Revit Furniture, revitstore, RevitBay, revitcars, Symbol Machine, TurboSquid, Yellowbryk) or commissioned to be custom-built (andekan, LONDON INFOTECH, Pinnacle Infotech, REVIT FACTORY, Revit MEP Store, SumexDesign, Revit Content, TheModus).

Level of detail within a family is critical—it has to have enough information to be worthwhile, but too much detail blows up the size of the model and slows down the work. Bruce promoted three levels of detail within a family: simple cubes with schedules can serve for preliminary design; 2D symbols are usually sufficient for orthographic views; while more detailed 3D geometry can be reserved for where it's really necessary. Dan also suggests swapping out objects as necessary when rendering.

Bruce proposed that it's up to us to address the difficulties we face with content. Currently our efforts are redundant—all firms are addressing these topics independently. Instead we must ask for what we want, provide feedback, and contribute to an industry-wide solution. As a starting point, he solicited input from us on our greatest frustrations related to BIM content. Among those things most mentioned were time lost due to searching for content, content that's not appropriate for a model's needs, poorly-built content, and interruption to work flow.

Bruce identified the things we want:

• A massive library: all the content we need, including system objects, generic objects, and manufacturer-specific objects.
• Consistency: file names, type names, parameters, and parameter names. These standards should be established and maintained by industry groups, professional organizations, national and international standards groups, some kind of AECO Wiki, and all of us in the industry.
• High quality: adherence to standards and quality control, making sure all parameters flex properly.
• Findable: A searchable database or some other resource is necessary to make accessing the content from so many sources feasible. Search parameters need to include discipline, Revit category and library folder names, object name, author, LOD, standard followed, generic vs. specific, and a rating of the quality.
• Accessible: cloud-based, mobile, download-able, and insert-able
• Free or low-cost: all stakeholders should sponsor improvement: manufacturers to fund specific content; consolidators to fund generic content; stores to develop generic and non-component content; professional and trade organizations to develop standards for names and units; and content users to develop standards  for display and function, and to provide input and feedback. Large AEC firms could also be drawn upon to build content.

On the subject of standards, Dave noted that there are existing systems that can be drawn upon. ISO9000, the National CAD Standards, and Omniclass have already sorted some of these things out.