Critical or constructive?

Critical or constructive?

Having been involved in computerisation from the early days of its popularisation in the 20th century, I'm often involved in ambitious projects that aspire to develop Company 2.0 or Society 3.0 - that kind of visionary, disruptive and innovative stuff that has become so popular. My involvement is thankfully limited: brainstorms in the early, conceptual stages or evaluations at the end. I sit in conference rooms, like I did last week, and listen to big words with little understanding of the technologies involved and their possible consequences. People are drunk with the potential of their world - not specific technologies but the abstract, vague spirit of the age: AI, blockchains, BIM, social media, big data are magic wands that can transform their reality into something else, something new that will help primarily their career.

It's difficult to remain constructive under such circumstances, lacking in structure and clarity of approach. What I hear reminds me of people excitedly buying more and more stuff for their homes, gadgets and furnishings with questionable utility, without any intention of replacing old stuff, without any thought as to combine the new with the old, just overloading and cluttering their lives. Yes, one can be eclectic and promote heterogeneity into a virtue but coherence has its advantages, especially if it helps reduce cost and effort. Computerisation remains too expensive and demanding to take it as a mere collage of an ever-growing collection tools and micro-environments. It's not enough to claim that one's making a new version of the world; one has to specify this version in a coherent and comprehensive manner.

But even if I would be inclined to neglect the overall picture, it's hard not to be critical of such individual tools and micro-environments. People just buy any old thing from so-called developers and advisors (most of them are just resellers of products with added unnecessary services: servitisation is for the benefit of the seller, not of the buyer), impressed by modernity and peer acceptance. They buy things that might overlap with what they already have, things that might not do what they expect, things that might perform worse than alternatives digital or analogue. Even worse, they often seem unable to take a step back and look at the mess they're buying.

So, what am I supposed to do? The easy option is to just sit there and nod gravely, letting them do the interpretation of my silence. Yet I cannot resist attempts to make them think for themselves, to offer them some starting point for structuring and explaining their own thoughts. It seldom works; one cannot talk rationally to junkies, it appears. Let the world dissolve into tiny pieces, each governed by salespeople and PR. We're rich enough to support them all, it transpires.

Symbolic representation

Symbolic representation 

I've heard it more than once: "So, what's new about BIM? We've seen it all before, with CAD libraries and the like." People who say such things are not only old, usually in their sixties, but also typically people with little if any hands-on experience about what they're talking. They're not people who spend time drawing, modelling or designing with computers, otherwise they might have noticed a fundamental difference between CAD and BIM: the level of symbols used.

In CAD, the basic primitives one interacts with, the ones that carry the essential information for the representation are graphic elements: lines, shapes, surfaces etc. In that CAD follows established traditions in architectural drawings, which rely on convention to support recognition. For example, two parallel lines close to each other and with a certain length must be a wall. So, in CAD we draw these two lines with vector graphics rather than ink on paper and if we want be sure that there'll be no misinterpretations, we group them together and possibly also label them as a wall. This changes little to the basis of the representation: it's two lines.

In BIM, one may still draw lines but works directly with symbols for architectural entities: one draws a line to indicate the axis of the wall but only to enter certain geometric properties. The type of the wall, its width and layers, are defined by type and not by the other lines. The appearance of the wall may be two parallel lines but that's just one of the many possible ways the wall may be depicted. What the representation knows is that there is a wall, not two or more lines.

This doesn't make BIM better than CAD, it just brings architectural representation closer to the structure of other digital kinds. Texts, for example, have been symbolic at the level of characters from the beginning - not complex pen strokes like in joined-up writing. When I type a letter on the keyboard, what the computer retains is an ASCII code for that character, possibly dressed up with a font, size etc. Just like a wall in BIM, this dressing up determines the appearance of the character; the character is not recognised on the basis of  its appearance.

The difference between BIM and CAD is therefore one of symbol level: BIM uses symbols for architectural entities, while CAD uses general graphic symbols, those belonging to the implementation level rather than the representation proper. There may be many things wrong with BIM but that it finally gives us a symbolic digital representation for architecture is significant.