Future Outlook on BIM Tools and Parametric Modeling

As presented in my post from last week, I do not believe the progress of BIM and its tools and parametric modeling are not going to be the issue in the building and construction industry.  With time the software and hardware issues will undoubtedly be resolved as well as upgraded and the systems will become more compatible, as well as user friendly.  And, I do not doubt that drafting in BIM will become a specialty skill as mentioned by G. Carpenter and required to a certain degree for those in the industry as mentioned in J. Lancellotti’s post.  The issues that have and will most likely continue to slow down the progress of BIM are the industry conventions that all groups within the industry have built their practices around.  This was addressed by our speaker Eric Kuszewski during our week 3 class.  He addressed the fact that many of the building system drawings and efforts were being doubled as a result of wanting to use BIM to show it one way and then the system engineer or someone else wanting to see in another way, or the “old” way.  He also addressed that this not only affected the engineers and their products, but those dealing with the contracts, deliverables, and metrics.  The groups that work on the latter have built what they do around the existing conventions.

As a result, I believe the BIM execution plan that Kuszewski mentioned will be heavily involved in creating new BIM centered conventions.  I do not believe that in 5 years everything will have completely made the switch to being “BIM-centric,” but the ability for all those involved to work together to shift from the practice of making separate drawings for buildings to virtually creating the building will be much improved as a result of one building era ending as the beginning of another approaches.  These changes may indeed result in the predictions made by M. Tedesco regarding the industry in ten and twenty years.