I was on a panel discussion on BIM in residential architecture during the summer of 2009. One of the audience members, after hearing the four of us talk for an hour, got up and said “But where is the ‘I’ in your work?” If I remember correctly she had mostly used AutoCAD and only briefly dabbled in Revit. Her complaint stemmed from most of the talk revolving around extracting views from the 3D model and other efficiencies that stemmed from the holistic architectural model. She was not impressed with window and door schedules or linked drawings. She wanted Information. We tried to explain. It’s right here. This is the Information. But she only heard information. And barely that. To her we were all just building glorified sketchup models. No one on the panel convinced her otherwise. I left feeling a little distraught. Were we not really doing BIM? I now know that was foolish worry. BIM is about workflow. About thinking, evolving, change.

In the current residential market in Minnesota what can BIM offer? In my position, what can I push, and what has to wait? What I can control now is our internal process. How we get to the finish line. Bigger, Better, Faster, Stronger. If how I work in ArchiCAD saves me 10 hours I get to have a choice. Does the client pay less? Do I make a bigger profit? Do I spend that time doing more design, providing more detail, reviewing my work for consistency errors or omissions? (Sadly, the user, often the weak link in the documentation phase, does not get upgraded every year.) Perhaps I figure out how to enhance my deliverables. Renderings maybe? A conceptual framing model? A tentative list of critical materials? To me that’s all part of working in BIM. Working on small projects, we have the opportunity to look down these alternate paths.