Lean Business Practices have been adopted in many industries such as automotive design and build, aircraft design and build, and ever increasingly by leading construction companies. What are the best practices the Architecture/Engineering (A/E) design industries can adopt and utilize? David Haynes, Director of Consulting for Ideate Inc., sheds more light on these issues in this Viewpoint article.
In this Viewpoint article, Paul Seletsky, who is the Digital Design Director at KieranTimberlake Associates, questions the current architectural education approach of providing sophisticated design tools to students, only to have them go on to practice professionally for decades on another level using outmoded means. He envisions another approach, where applied research centers would bring architects, universities, and the public together to advance Building Design using the latest Digital Design tools. Under the imprimatur of the national architectural association and in affiliation with local universities, well-equipped and staffed architecture research labs (AR Labs) would enable students and practitioners to develop design ideas both physically and digitally, build 3D mock-ups, learn new fabrication methods, and perform energy analyses and simulations via BIM.
In this Viewpoint article, Viktor Várkonyi, CEO of Graphisoft, discusses the fundamentals of cloud computing, including the four different approaches to it popularized by different companies such as Amazon, Google, and Apple, and then turns to specifically discuss BIM implementation in the cloud. He debunks the notion in the AEC industry that BIM already has or will very soon have fully moved to the cloud, and discusses the two main factors that should be taken into account when cloud computing for BIM is being considered.
This Viewpoint article by Christopher Pynn and John Hainsworth, who are both Associates in Arup’s Sydney Office and actively involved in its BIM development and implementation, ponders on the question of “What is BIM?” and comes up with some interesting analogies between BIM and cuisine. Along the way, it also discusses Arup’s approach to BIM. It is a refreshingly candid article, and the analogy with food is unique and witty and makes for a great read!
Esperanto is an artificially constructed language, developed with the goal of being a lingua-franca across nations speaking different tongues, in the hope of facilitating collaboration, cooperation and good will. In this Viewpoint article, Gustavo Lima, Principal and Director of Construction Administration at Cannon Design, focuses on the need for Project Management applications to speak such a neutral language to each other, so that they can be used by all AEC professionals to communicate directly with one another, without the need for duplicate data entry and while keeping their own data secure and private.
Current academic research in AEC aims to understand the steps beyond BIM, which will help chart the future of our industry over the coming decades. This Viewpoint article by Robert Amor, University of Auckland, New Zealand, and Robert Owen, University of Salford, UK, describes an international research effort in this area, coordinated by the Integrated Design and Delivery Solutions (IDDS) initiative of the CIB (International Council for Research and Innovation in Building and Construction).