BIM PENCIL : TAKE ONE

This is a 25 minute talk I gave at the 3rd Dubai BIM Breakfast in November.  I'm going to split it into parts because it does rather go on a bit :-)

I think we should treat BIM like a pencil.  Anyone can pick up a pencil and adapt it to their needs.  It's a very flexible tool.  We can use it to write a shopping list, to draw a map, to write poetry.  It is equally at home in a board room, on a building site, in a classroom or a research laboratory.

But if we want BIM to be as flexible and inclusive as a pencil, we might have to cast off our business blinkers.  Much of the discussion about BIM is dominated by business jargon: ROI, competitive edge, BIM protocols & execution plans, risk management ... all that bureaucratic stuff.  I'm not saying that it's wrong or unimportant, just that the focus can get a little too narrow.  Beware of tunnel vision.

I grew up with a pencil in my hand.  My dad was an art teacher and he introduced me to the grand tradition of visual thinking that stretches back thousands & thousands of years.  When I use the word pencil, I'm really referring to that grand tradition.  There is a special synergy that takes place between hand, eye and brain when we draw or paint.  I believe there is much to gain from connecting BIM processes to that intuitive, visual, problem-solving side of our brain.

When we used pencils to design buildings we didn't feel the need to go round saying "I've just bought these new pencils, they're really going to help us grow the bottom line"  We might say "I've got this new pencil, it really feels great and the quality of the line it produces is superb." 

So I'm going to invite you to take off the business blinkers for a few minutes and imagine that BIM is part of the age old tradition of visual thinking.

Let's start by reflecting on the age of hand drafting for a moment.  It was slower of course. For all but the very earliest stages of design thinking it can't compete any more.  But were there any advantages ?  Can we learn something from the past ?

First of all, it was a much pleasanter way to spend your day and rather healthier in my view.  When we worked at drawing boards could vary our posture more, stretch our limbs, stand up for a while.  There was a craft element to the work.  You could take a pride in the quality of your linework, the rhythm of your hand written notes.  There were little rituals to do with maintaining your drawing tools and keeping the paper clean. 

It was much easier and more natural to take a step back and review your work from a distance, both literally and metaphorically. Every time you went for a cup of coffee you could pause a couple of metres away from your board and cogitate while you sipped away.

These days it's as if we have our heads stuck inside a box.  Put the earphones on, get into the zone.  We tend to leave our work behind when we step away.  Back then you would stand back a couple of metres with your cup of copy and get a fresh perspective.

And this same pauses acted as an invitation for your neighbours to sidle up and throw in a comment or two.  Casual sharing was just built in.  These days you have to print out a few sheets and invite people over to a breakout space.  Or you might have big screens installed, perhaps even expensive digital white boards.  All good stuff but just a trifle forced compared to the olden days.

It's often said that your weaknesses are also your strengths.  The lack of an undo button was a major pain.  Lots of workarounds: scratch away with razor blades, battery powered erasers with thin metal shields to mask out the stuff you wanted to keep.  The positive side of all that was that we had to be decisive.  No second chances.  Get it right !  And clients couldn't get away with changing their minds they way they do today.  Just wasn't possible if you wanted to get your building built.  And I am constanly struck by how much more is demanded in terms of output with each passing decade.

Hundreds of sheets where we used to be satisfied with a couple of dozen.  20 or 30 photorealistic renders where you would have been lucky to get one hand drawn perspective.
Fine, but are the resulting buildings any better as a result ?  I'm not sure they are to be honest. 

This one is beyond dispute.  We may have touch screens and tablets but nothing yet comes close to the tactile fluency of pencil and paper.  Sit around a table with sheets of tracing paper and ideas flow thick and fast.  That hand-eye-brain thing has been going on for thousands of years.  It's a bit like body language or eye contact.  You can't beat it for rapid effective communication, brainstorming, problem-solving.

Yes there are wonderful things that BIM can do for us, insights that were unavailable before, but we still lag on the fluency side.  I hope that will change.

I'm not sure why people tend to overlook this, but it's hugely important.  All drawing, all modelling involves simplification.  You have to be selective, to abstract the essentials.  When working by hand this is perfectly obvious.  You are constantly aware that the pencil lines you draw are simplified abstractions.  Sadly when creating a digital model we can fool ourselves that it

I just talked about standing back from the drawing board.  What I want to do now is stand back and look at the history of drawing, very briefly.  This first slide shows some of the drawing tools that have come and gone in my lifetime.  Rotring pens were actually invented when I was a teenager and I did once own a set of the caliper-like devices that preceded them.

The next segment is a short history of drawing over the past 30 thousand years.  Highly selective, simplified, abstract.  Here are some drawing technologies that have come and gone in my lifetime.  I wasn't around in 1860, but I'm almost old enough to have witnessed the transition from blueprints to diazo.

These are some of the oldest drawings we know about.  They are about 5 times older than the oldest writing, so visual thinking is rather more fundamental to the human brain than verbal thinking. 
These are drawings from Lascaux & Altamira, Chauvet.  We may think that we are much more advanced than cave men, but I challenge you to draw something that stands up alongside these remarkable images.  We may not understand what they were for, but they were surely full of meaning and information content for the people that made them.

So those were the oldest drawings we know of and this is some of the first writing.  The drawings are five times as old.  Visual thinking is much more ancient than verbal thought.  Here we have software, (the idea of symbols that represend sounds, syllables or words) hardware (clay tablet & stylus) reprographics (roll the cylinder over wet clay to make multiple copies)  Nothing much has changed since the first cities turned up in Iraq.

Here is some of the earliest writing.  It's also a kind of visual thinking, and ultimately it will become the data in our BIM models, so it belongs in this historical overview.  I'm introducting the idea of software, hardware & reprographics here.  Sofware is the idea of symbols that represent sonds and words, hardware is the clay and the stylus, reprographics is a cylinder that is rolled over wet clay to create multiple copies.  Nothing new under the sun-dried-clay.

Short of time, so a huge leap forward in time now to the renaissance.  Theory of perspective is the software breakthrough, equally as important as the personal computer in my view, a huge conceptual leap.  Hardware is represented by the device the artist is using to figure out how perspective works.  We could also cite the scientific method under the software heading here: systematic gathering of data by the method shown to test out the theory of horizon lines and vanishing points. 
This drawing is by Albrecht Durer and it's actually a wood engraving.  You can see the way he uses grooves cut into the wood to simulate the textures of different materials. 
Now we jump from 5000 years ago to 500 years ago.  Software is represented by the theory of perspective. Hardware is the device the artist is using to decode the conundrum of how perspective works.  Reprographics is the art of wood engraving that Durer exploited with such skill and flair

Durer also made use of orthographic projection as shown in this fascinating study of the 3 dimensionality of a human foot. It almost looks like a recipe for a parametric digital model.  An important point to note here is the way that drawing crosses the boundaries between art and science. 

The pendulum clock also uses orthographic, but in combination with 3d projections and a fair amount of embedded data.  This clock was a conceptual breakthrough that ranks high on the software scale and of course it became an item of hardware with a huge impact on peoples lives.

Just as the pendulum clock improved accuracy in timekeeping,  copper plate engraving enabled a finer line in printmaking.  It also opened up the possibility of acid etching.
I'm going to break off there, and pick up the BIM pencil story again in another post.