In this post, I am looking for honest thoughts on the current state of AEC design tech, at the risk of sounding naïve.
With the progressive movement of European governments toward openBIM mandates, Millennials and GZs (an ever-increasing demographic amongst operators and the client base) expecting high fidelity visualisation experiences as default. With (let us for now assume) the additional effort associated with high quality open data delivery through the supply chain, this really calls into question the validity of the AEC delivery technology options and combinations. I think we take for this for granted as still being relevant and fit for purpose. We appear to be still ‘bolting’ process to the back end, for example validating data sheets and models well after their development, rather than getting them right during their creation. Insane!
For 2025, here are 6 BASIC REQUIREMENTS that I believe will exist for our market. For clarity, I am not expecting one tool to solve all at once, but asking for opinions on the combinations of tools, which I may not be aware of, which are fit (or not) for purpose.
1. The ability to apply a tagging and naming standard to objects (human readable, unique identifiers being applied to instances of families and their data rows/ parameter sets). In OEM this is similar to a stock number, but still a little unusual for AEC. This offers the ability to understand a hierarchy of location and function without having to have a secondary search or lookup (if you would use the type4 GUID approach that BIM tends to assume is useful).
2. Contemporary visualisation standards. This can be somewhat relative, but let us assume at least; a model environment/deliverable should have textures, shading and lighting, or appearance standards that initially appear like they would in the physical world, but complimented by the ability to traffic light/slice the environment by some kind of filter across the data (e.g. data completion, LOD, design resolution), and present engineering information with this data.
3. At minimum, the ability to rapidly (!-RAPIDLY-! / Realtime) develop sheets and view graphics, with logical hidden line, sectioned edge, associative dimensions, annotations, schedules and other notes. This should probably be combined with the requirements of point 2 for shading- everyone has colour screens and printers now. In addition, said views need a high degree of updateability from the model base. Note- this is not a suggestion of autogeneration of sheets with geometric dimensioning, annotation and tolerancing. It is however an acknowledgement that many of our tools do not even achieve the ability to rapidly create drawing views from models. (I am highly aware of tools such as Inventor and Revit, you must understand this capability is not evenly shared).
4. Cloud shareability of model views, with camera locations, rotations, markups or annotations, filters and custom data highlighting, for both collaboration AND final deliverables. This should be paired of course with persona/role/company/security/review, status or suitability filtering and sharing features. For bonus points, the ability to curate views into a way of storytelling or according to a narrative, a bit like a GIS storymap.
5. The ability to be working as much (or predominantly) in ‘type space’ than ‘instance space’. This means- the ability to codify design patterns or configurations (familes or blocks) with their internal parameter list as well as geometric makeup. Effectively, a class library across data and graphics, where one can even encode specifications for systems as well as elements. This could even go as far as pre-encoding setout, dimensioning and tagging rules across elements. This also ensures a parametric or refreshability across the whole project data set (and no I am not talking about a monolithic, work-shared Revit file, but an entire project environment).
6. The SIMPLE (let’s just start with manually managed) definition of work packages according to project performance, commercial or scope requirements, which could include validating against them with the views mentioned above (a way of proposing and tracking packages against requirements, and having insight tables or reports being generated, almost as a WIP production assistant). I am aware of tools such as DOORS or 3Dexperience.
Bonus: Structured data management, in packages, which encompases all of the above, with data change management tools (review tasks or submittals workflow).
How is your design firm approaching these problems, and have there been any successful breaks or part substitutes you have made?
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