12 November 2011 | Posted inBlog News & Updates, Featured
BIM as a Catalyst for Design Discovery
I was inspired this weekend by a quote by Jacob Bronowski from his 1973 documentary series, The Ascent of Man:
“Discovery is a double relation of analysis and synthesis together. As an analysis, it probes for what is there. But then as a synthesis, it puts the parts together in a form in which the creative mind transcends the bare limits, the bare skeleton that nature provides.” – Jacob Bronowski, The Ascent of Man: The Grain in the Stone
While preparing a presentation on the topic of BIM’s influence over the early design process, it occurred to me that BIM can be thought of to create a sort of resonance between analysis and synthesis within this process of discovery as described by Brownowski. I’ve illustrated this idea in the diagram above.
BIM is then an informant within the discovery process. It is a tool for putting forth unexpected elements of synthesis as key ingredients for discovery, thus providing fuel to the mind in pulling these elements together in otherwise non-intuitive ways.
In a more practical sense, you could imagine that within the design process feedback loop — that of sketching out ideas, inputting these ideas into a building information model, printing out a synergistic output from the database, and finally analyzing and synthesizing the output into new sketches and repeating – a building information model plays the role of embedding and revealing relationships between data that are not otherwise obvious.
And in a more literal sense, this idea can be exemplified by cutting a building section through a portion of your design within the building information model, printing it out, and discovering spatial relationships within the section that you had not otherwise anticipated. These relationships then influence your design decision making moving forward in updating the BIM only to find newly unexpected spatial relationships upon your next output of that section. The discovery of such relationships is also enriched by the supporting datasets supplied by the BIM by way of embedded program data, material information, energy modeling, and the like.
This idea of a resonance of discovery by way of BIM was indeed a defining characteristic within the collaborative design process of the design project I was most recently a part of, and I look forward to presenting the specifics of this in the near future.
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