Thinking outside the box

As a BIM advocate I have found myself trying to pull others into my linear workflow instead of working with their design workflow. In my last post  “the Mechanic and the Designer“, I talked about my breakthrough on how I can support the less direct workflow used by designers. My new struggle is; how can I do that? I’m a geek that loves BIM process and the idea of Open BIM (yep, it’s what I dream about), it’s hard for me to understand and anticipate the needs of designers.

So how do I support the non-linear workflow of designers?

I’ve been working on the basics of this for a while: this kind of support always starts with trust. I need the designers I work with to feel comfortable chatting with me about what they need and what will help them move forward with design. It’s hard to overstate the importance of this — designers need the space and time to work through a project and find the best approach, and often aren’t aware of the Revit support that’s available. Regular chats about the direction of the project and design options gives me information about what tools I can provide, and providing designers with simple tasks using BIM tools can encourage team members to be more adventurous in their BIM strategies.

Once I understood designers don’t use the BIM standard workflow and I decided to try to support a design-based non-linear workflow, I realized the only way to promote and encourage BIM use is to help designers find new (and BIM-based) solutions to their design problems. My opportunity to test this came when one of my teams needed to present a large multi-phase, multiyear project to a group of investors. The challenge? They needed to efficiently show phasing and construction for the site. When I learned of this need, I suggested using a 4D timeliner to show each phase as it is built. The team had never considered coming to me for help with this because they didn’t know this type of presentation tool was possible.

I took this opportunity to show them the power and interoperability of BIM tools by providing them a timeline video building massing for each phase of the design. This lead to questions of “how can we do that on more projects?”, and my favourite, “you mean I can get all the areas in real time using this massing and develop something to present?” Suddenly I was working with a team that was interested and excited about using BIM for presentation, and who wanted to learn more about how BIM could be collaborative and assist with the design of their project.

I broke down the steps for the designers and showed them that Revit massing is not very different from Sketchup, once you know how to put the different parts together. The benefit to using Revit is that it is designed for easy data extraction: there is no need to export to CAD and draw a polyline to figure out area.

I provided a simple massing process, and I didn’t try to convince them not to work in Sketchup. Instead, I let the designers start in a software with procedures where they were comfortable, and I asked them to let me move the work into Revit when they were ready to start calculations. Instead of asking them to start the Revit model from scratch, I took the Sketchup model into Revit and massed up the buildings.  I think because I don’t know Sketchup and I’m skilled at Revit it took me very little time. Once I had their model in place they used it to generate area numbers, and found they were comfortable enough in the model to edit the massing to review the impact of different floor plates on their maximum area calculations.

Now that team rarely opens Sketchup and they have used Revit to develop their design and take the model onto Design Development documents.

Funny how having passion to teach and drive BIM in the industry creates opportunities to lead designers into BIM without even planning it.