B3 - The future of BIM in the AEC industry

The video that we all watched in class from Autodesk University, “The Future of BIM Will Not Be BIM – and It’s Coming Faster than You Think” [1], gave in an-depth look into how BIM developed, what it is capable of today, and what it will be capable of the near future.  The question is, how far away is “the near future”, and also what industries will it affect in what timeframe?  In class, Dr. Mitchell mentioned that he would like us to speculate 10 years into the future, and to see what role BIM will have in the AEC industry in that time; However, I believe it will take longer than 10 years.  As was clearly shown in the video in class, some architects and designers are already using BIM modeling in conjunction with visual coding softwares to compare design models for optimization.  I believe that this is most helpful for them because they are designing systems from scratch with no framework to guide them.  In the AEC industry, though, typically engineers are given a basic design (usually in the form of DD level drawings) to begin their design work on for their particular system.  Often, this basic design will be enough to limit an engineer’s design to a handful of options on larger decisions like duct runs, pipe risers, and column locations.  Because of this, I do not believe that this level of BIM modeling will become integrated into the AEC industry within the next 10 years.  I think that first, it will get more integrated in the baseline design and architecture industries more heavily, and following that, once it is better understood and easier to integrate, the AEC industry will more-so “adopt” it, rather than get it integrated.  The difference in “adopting” and “integrating” in my mind, is that only small areas of the AEC industry will utilize this level of BIM modeling, and it will also be almost fully developed by the time the AEC industry really begins to use it to its full potential.  That is adopting, because it will already exist, and will not permeate through the industry as heavily as the architecture industry.  I also believe that if this were to happen, it will take more than 10 years, as it will be closer to 20 years.

[1] Allen, Bill. “The Future of BIM Will Not Be BIM—and It's Coming Faster than You Think.” YouTube, uploaded by Autodesk University, 23 November 2016,   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xq6yKyauu-o

Comment 1 – Gabriel Grajewski:

Gabe, I completely agree that I think it will take more than 10 years for the AEC industry to utilize BIM modeling that was shown in the video to its full potential. You bring up a good point that higher mathematics knowledge will be required to use this type of modeling. I would imagine that future engineers would gain those knowledge in college, prior to becoming an engineer. If this is the case, then I can absolutely see how this would take more than 10 years. First the industry would need to show a need for this type of work to be done (which is may already be doing), then the universities need to recognize this need, and adjust their curriculums accordingly. Finally, new students need to enroll in those universities, and complete the coursework, and then become profession engineers, which is about a 9 year task on its own (college = 4 years, P.E. = 5 years). If this is the course that the industry will take, then I agree that it will definitely take more than 10 years.

Comment 2 – Albert Hanan:

Albert, I had the same prediction in my post of about 20 years before the AEC industry adopts advanced BIM modeling like what was shown in the video in class.  My experience I think is similar to yours, where I worked for a small engineering firm, and followed that up by working for two mid-sized firms.  The smaller firm still used physical stick sets, which pre-dates AutoCAD, while the mid-sized firms were moving towards integrating Revit into their projects.  It is interesting to see that both smaller firms like I worked for, and also larger ones like you worked for (Jacobs Engineering) are still roughly in the same area.  It makes me think that the AEC industry evolution into BIM is independent from company or industry size, but rather the interests of a particular company's management team.

Comment 3 – Harvin Bhandal:

Harvin, I mostly agree with your time-frame, although I think that there is a good chance that it will take longer than 15 years.  You also posed a new perspective that I did not consider, being that all stakeholders must agree to this method as opposed to traditional engineering methods.  Mostly all people that are experienced and high enough in their respective companies to be a stakeholder are fairly set in their ways, know what they are paying for when signing the contract, and may be hesitant to risk a project they are paying for on a new method that has not been fully vetted by the industry.  As stated in the video, mostly larger projects with more resources and larger companies will utilize this technology first, as they have the extra space in their budgets to train their employees and pay for the software, which should also impact higher leveled stakeholders.  This will hopefully trickle down into smaller projects over the course of, what I believe, to be 20 years.