Built Environment Industry Innovation Council (BEIIC), Industry Speaks Workshop

Blog entry by: Dominik Holzer

Australia’s Built Environment Industry Innovation Council (BEIIC) was established in September 2008. BEIIC acts as an advisory body to the Minister and as an innovation advocate for the Australian industry. The Council considers industry innovation challenges like climate change, sustainability and industry competitiveness as well as issues such as regulatory reform, workforce capability, skills needs and uptake new technologies.

buildingSmart MESH Seminar Series

Blog entry by: Dominik Holzer

Under the ‘Mesh’ logo, buildingSmart Australia organised a conference series in several Australian capital cities, weaving together multiple aspects of design technology, collaboration and product lifecycle data.

Some of the questions raised during Mesh were as follows: How do we collaborate with multi-disciplinary models; what opportunities are there for optimisation, improved environmental performance, sustainability, life cycle assessment? How is planning compliance, Local Government management, etc affected? How do modellers get access to life-cycle product data?

Design, analysis and the Cloud

Blog entry by: Dominik Holzer

In collaborative design practice, computational tools are becoming ever more utilised to help bridge the gaps between designers, consultants and contractors who search for streamlined exchange of information. Despite early promises of BIM software developers to provide us with tools that assist collaborative design practice, most BIM authoring tools facilitate tasks of individual professions such as architects, structural consultants, MEP consultants or quantity surveyors.

BIM in a Legal Context

Blog entry by: Dominik Holzer

In a recent meeting with construction lawyers it became apparent to me how important the legal profession is about to become in assisting the construction industry to escape from the impasse we witness in the adoption of BIM. Whereas technical issues related to the implementation of BIM undergo ever greater resolution, there are manifold contractual, IP and legal issues that are as yet little resolved.

Australian BIM Forum 2010

Blog entry by: Dominik Holzer

Public discussions about BIM by industry bodies such as the Australian Institute of Architect or Consult Australia have been rather sparse since the 2007 RAIA National Conference in Melbourne. At that event, the RAIA held an entire one day parallel stream about BIM, to complement their ‘usual’ program that was less technology focussed.

Since 2007 a lot has happened in the BIM world and the RAIA (now AIA) joined forces with Consult Australia and Autodesk to set up a series of BIM  forums in four major Australian cities. I was invited by the organisers to facilitate the Melbourne and Sydney events in October and November 2010. The forums had the aim to identify the challenges, successes and failures of using BIM to create integrated principles within the AEC industry.

A selected number of 35-40 AEC industry representatives with design, engineering, construction and client background were invited to review key challenges in the uptake of BIM. Those challenges included: the cost of implementation, cultural change, IP Ownership, data manager and security, quality of documentation, improved collaboration, earlier decision-making, the evaluation of alternatives for sustainable design and improvements using analysis during the design process.

Discussions at all the forums were lively with extensive feedback provided by the floor. During the individual sessions comments were recorded and they were then summarised in a 14 page report titled: BIM in Australia 2010 that can be downloaded here!

Optioneering

Blog entry by: Dominik Holzer

If one investigates the information-flow of traditional architect - engineer collaboration over the last century one will most likely encounter a process where engineers are asked to join a design project at a certain stage to help realize the architect’s ideas. The shortfall of such a work-method is the relative disconnectedness between performance feedback and design morphology.  Those architects and engineers who aim for more integrated design-practice are in search for ways that allow them to design more concurrently and to exchange information bi-directionally.  Such a process requires a high level of skill, trust and confidence in those involved. It forces architects to let go of their role as sole-authors to admit outside involvement from consultants. It requires engineers to become more proactively engaged in the design process and it prompts them to consider the bigger picture of how their input affects the overall design, both technically and aesthetically.

Humble Parametrics

Blog entry by: Dominik Holzer

Design computation and in recent years particularly parametrics and scripting have opened up a vast array of possibilities for creative minds to approach design problems in unprecedented ways. Taking advantage of the rule based approach computational design offers, many architects have done what they do best: exploring the possibilities of new tools at hand by testing the grounds in a playful and investigatory manner.