ArchSociety

It is better to treat the present day BIM as a primitive rather than an advanced technology. BIM has indeed a long way to go to become the real integrated platform of design and design-communication.

 

The biggest problem of introducing today's BIM to education and also profession is, the compatibility and dependency issue. It is obvious that several different software companies will create their own platforms, systems and file formats. But BIM is such a necessary technology adaption that the diversity of platform and compatibility needs to be stopped to make it a truly global technology of mass use. 

 

As at the core of BIM is accessibility, if professionals and workers from the supporting disciplines of construction industry, and even the general people can not access the technology easily then the core concept of BIM fails. We need to ensure this accessibility and universal compatibility of this technology from 'yesterday'! Otherwise introducing a particular dependency ridden platform to students and professionals will simply lead to a more 'technology difference' than union.

 

To get rid of this compatibility and dependency issues we need to look forward to the ways of a global union. Similar to the aviation industry, programing languages and hardware technology, BIM needs a Global Alliance to set a uniform standard for all. Manufacturer, workers on site, engineers, clients, enthusiasts, students, architects everyone will use the same standardized file system and distribution protocol. 

 

And we need this even before we think of integrating BIM extensively to academia. Here I am looking into the possibility of a Global body that will set the standard basic structure of BIM, it will be a cloud-based, platform independent filing and distribution protocol. How the individual front end softwares will be designed and sold will still remain the discretion of the software companies. For example, Autodesk may keep making Revit and Graphisoft keep producing their ArchiCAD, but the file system and a cloud based global sharing protocol will be standardized by the Global Alliance, that front end system will be inclusive, platform independent and globally accessible using any device. That's the ideal scenario of the future BIM we need to focus on.