Printing Architectural Documents is a Waste of Your Time
A local Minnesota ArchiCAD (and Revit) user wrote to me about his new machine after reading my post over on BIM Engine about hardware requirements for ArchiCAD. He had this to say:
“…I am testing a brand new iMac. Â It’s the 27″ model and it’s completely built-to-order with the beefier hardware. Â I’ve been using it for a couple weeks now and it’s really nice for ArchiCAD. Â The 2560 x 1440 display is the first I’ve used that feels like it has enough space for all the tool bars and palettes on one screen. Â I’d recommend it for those looking for a less expensive desktop than a Mac Pro (especially since that line will likely be overhauled sometime this summer).”
That’s all pretty interesting, but it’s this next bit that really caught my attention:
“On this screen a 24″ x 36″ PDF CD set is slightly larger than half-size when viewed in full screen mode, so you no longer have to pan or zoom when on the phone with a GC while going through drawings. Â That is awesome.”
One of the last remaining benefits of printed architectural documents, especially in house, is their size. But how often do we opt for exploring a half-size set because the full-size sets are just too ungainly to maneuver on our cluttered desks. Using a 27″ screen like this iMac, a 30″ external monitor, or something equally big, is an awesome alternative to flipping through printed sets. Because half-size is great for most questions. And when you need a full size detail, you can always zoom.
And to refer back to yesterday’s post on skeuomorphs, the half size set on a monitor is superior to the printed set for many reasons. I’ll just give you one (for now). The text in a PDF is searchable. Ever stared at a printed set and said to everyone around you in a meeting “I know that note is somewhere”.
Digital Set 1 Printed Set 0
One more thing. A 27″ monitor is pretty cheap today. 30″ ones are a lot pricier, so probably not the best investment. But remember this is still just Q2 2013. It’s only a matter of time before 30″ monitors get cheap. And then soon after that I’m sure we’ll all have 40″ touch screen monitors. And a PDF on a large touch screen is going to be incredible.
Liz O'Sullivan
I have a 32″ monitor (an LCD HDTV, actually, because it’s cheaper than an actual 32″ monitor). I still print out half-size sets of drawings for reviewing them completely after a progress set. I’m old, maybe.
But if I’m looking for something specific in the set, I prefer to view it on the screen, and I LOVE searching for text in a PDF set of drawings. It’s really a timesaver.
Jared Banks
How do you like using the 32″ HDTV as a monitor? I’ve read mixed reviews about that. Do you find it gets fuzzy with small details?
Liz O'Sullivan
I look at words more than half of the time – I’m a specifications consultant. But for my purposes, when I look at drawings, it’s fine. I do not actually produce drawings, though, so if I were producing drawings, it might be an issue.
Jared Banks
Thanks. Good to know. That means it’d probably work well for me too, as I tend to do way more words than images these days!
Ryan Lillion
A somewhat silly, but also somewhat functional hack for those that want 30+ screen range on the cheap, buy a television for your second display (32″/1080 -$250-$350). Monitor manufacturers are beginning to react to this method, particularly Viewsonic (32″- $400). Beware, you’ll get 1920 x 1080 for it, however you need to be cognizant of this with monitors as well since most are still at this resolution. You can purchase Ultrasharp, but the prices go up quickly for 2560 x 1440 (27″- $700+, 30″-$1100+). CDs at1920 x 1080 may or may not cut it for you, but it’s certainly worth considering. For anyone that finds paying any of these prices for a second display silly, how much are you paying on consumables per year? Some amusing perspective:
http://boingboing.net/filesroot/200912301004.jpg
Ryan Lillion
…..just noticed the posts above after posting this 🙂
Jared Banks
Ryan, that chart is amazing. It also shows an interesting inverse correlation to price and shelf-life. HP Black Ink #45 is probably useless if it’s not used every 12-24 hours, where as crude oil is forever! Or at least that’s what my experience was in college when I got heavily into sustainability and had a love/hate (mostly hate) relationship with the amazing Epson 1280 printer.
Great points about the HDTV as monitor. As a second monitor that’s a great idea. It makes me think I need to revise this equation by replacing iPad with 32″ HDTV. I could so see using a 15″ macbook pro with a great screen for primary work and a 32″ HDTV next to it for reviewing documents, spinning 3D models, etc. All the stuff that needs very good but not extreme resolution. Something to think about when I set up a more permanent office in Boston.
Dave Olufs
Jared– When reviewing shop drawings, I request/require SD submittals be PDFs, then put into an AC worksheet. There I mark them in red, use a digital shop drawing review stamp then return them as marked up PDFs… It’s faster and minimizes the monotony of reviewing 3 or 4 or 5 sets of hardcopy shop drawings. Still fine-tuning but contractors seem to like it… but not all my engineers. They’ll get there…
It certainly minimize the paper usage and waste…
Cheers!
Jared Banks
Dave that is awesome. I wrote a post years ago that suggested doing something like that and it’s on my to do list to update the post. Maybe I can just interview about your process?
Dave Olufs
With AC, it could be DWGs or PDFs because when I put them in a worksheet, they’re one element or at least that’s what happens in my work. I select from a variety of red lines, text and arrows to ‘bleed’ all over the shop drawings.
Finally, I put my digital stamp, which I created from the ink-stamp ones, mark the response or action, date, sign and return. The signature is easier in a PDF doc but PDFs are brutal to mark in Adobe.
I keep all the shop drawings in my computer folders under #### 06 Shop Drawings. Each trade has its own folder under #### 06 08 Openings, etc. with all submissions in and out. It’s readily accessed in my job folders and easy to send back to engineers and contractors.
Shop drawings could be included in the original AC file… depending on size. But to-date, I put all the shop drawings in a separate AC file. I don’t use my borders but use whatever comes with the SD, place on a layout sheet, print out as PDF, send and I’m done.
Fun with shop drawings!
Jared Banks
Nice! When I get around to writing my future shop drawing post, I might have a few more questions for you. Thanks.
Brian Lighthart
Producing hardcopy would be a waste of time, except that users like the building department, bank, and subcontractors usually want hardcopy, and the person on the other end of a phone call don’t always want to wait while I find the model and wait for it to load, or even while I wait for a pdf to load. I can grab my half-size prints (and more and more lately, my magnifier) in two seconds. Compared to that, the time to find and open a pdf while I am on the phone with a subcontractor seems like an eternity.
Jared Banks
Very true. I don’t have good comebacks for any of that… yet. But the answers to all that are definitely part of the bigger puzzle. I keep hearing about various municipalities slowly moving to digital, so there’s hope. And ideally we’ll help push people in that direction.
For load time on opening PDFs… maybe it’s time for an SSD? 😉
Geoff Briggs
I agree with all the positives about big screens, multi-page PDFs, zoomability (is that a word?), searchability, color, etc. I use all those every day, and promote their more widespread adoption. (Seattle now accepts permit submittals online and is moving their review process entirely to PDF, which just saved every architect a ton of money, time and repro-headaches.) But to my mind none of this actually diminishes the many inherent values of the printed page (which I’m sure I don’t need to enumerate) but rather adds many new tools to our kit.
Again, don’t throw it out a process because it’s old. Choose the best processes and tools for the ever increasing facets of the building lifecycle. For example it’s great if the fire dept. can pull up a 3D model of a building on the way to a rescue, but you’re sure gonna be happy to have that big roll of prints when the whole region is out of power.
Jared Banks
Very true. I don’t think I said it in this post, but another recent one. It’s not about throwing out the old for the new, but something more complex. Letting the new thrive and not holding it to old constraints. Or something to that effect. It definitely doesn’t diminish the value of old, but we need to be open to the opportunities of added value with a new (different) system.
That’s great that Seattle is moving digital.
Oh and something to think about regarding your example, which is a good one by the way. With laptops, mobile devices like tables and smartphones, and things like back-up generators, etc. the value proposition gets more complex. If the power is off, we still need light to view the paper; if the power is off, digital isn’t necessarily disabled. In a burning building a fire fighter can’t carry a roll of drawings. But he could perhaps have a rugged tablet. Or a heads-up display like Google Glass. Obviously all a little Sci-fi, but not that far off. Just something for us both to chew over…
Paul Adams
Finally, one of my builders has adopted iPads for their field work, so I can print the PDFs and they are shared with the workers in the field; since everybody is so cost conscious about full size drawings, typically, the Boss has the drawings in his truck across town while the guys who NEED to know right then don’t have a set to look at. I am hoping this solves some issues that have been resolve on the drawings, but still don’t get built properly.
Jared Banks
Oh very cool. I’m glad to hear this is happening now. I’d love to hear more about your experiences with that. The good, the bad, the surprising… Guest post?
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pallsopp42
We use ArchiCAD running on OS X. Personally I have an iMac 27″ with 16GM of RAM and a 3.4GHz Intel Core i7 processor. Its FAST and the screen real estate is truly amazing.
Rather than print out a ton of drawings each time we meet with clients (a time-consuming and costly approach), we will re-box an iMac with the above specs and take it to our meeting. We and our client(s) can then sit down in front of the screen and run through the project and details on the fly making any changes as we go. Its a bit like a Rogers and Hammerstein event; we are at the keyboard playing the “piano”, listening to our client voice ideas, concerns and questions and responding as we test out ideas in 3D and check point the impacts (where necessary) in EcoDesigner Star.
We’ve done the same thing with building code and planning officials. It really gets them bought into the project and gives us the ability to fine tune our BIM model before printing out a ton of drawings for a “blind” submission.
Jared Banks
That is a great solution. I love the analogy. It’s improvisation. 🙂
Louis Medcalf
I like to use a monitor for QA reviews of drawings and record comments with Newforma mark-up tools, but a half-size set of paper prints is sure handy and much faster for checking cross-references between sheets. The comment regarding using word search on PDFs is spot on.
Geoff Briggs
This conversation got me thinking about a few things, mainly how the concept of publishing is evolving. Even in the ArchiCAD era it has primarily equated to printing until very recently. Even as PDFs became the chosen output their purpose was usually an intermediary to printing. Clearly that has changed. And that change foretells developments to come.
A quick story for context. We share our models with our GCs using BIMx, an they love it. They can answer so many questions about complex assemblies themselves. Of course the BIMx model is a snapshot in time just like a PDF. This is both good and bad. The other day the project engineer on one of our jobs spotted an error in the location of a ventilation grille in the BIMx and sent us a question and screenshot. Looking in AC the grille appeared correct. But since I suspected it had moved and moved again in this large teamwork project I needed to ensure it was now correct. So I consulted a couple published PDFs that included dimensions of this element and indeed everything was A-OK.
This sequence exposed so many intersecting concerns about the current state of the art in BIM it made my head spin: Old school 2D ended up being the best way to validate a live BIM. Wouldn’t a 3D compare feature be awesome? Yes, but only if we had saved a validated model at the “right” time, and even then can you ever ensure the whole model is correct? Sharing models (like BIMx) is great but it exposes all the flaws that are traditionally hidden by simply not “publishing” them. On and on.
On this project we are designing one or two steps ahead of what the GC is building, a situation that is no longer rare. Fast forward to the day we are all “in” the same BIM, with tradespeople pulling measurements from the model. How do we maintain accuracy when everything is constantly in flux? If printing is nearing obsolescence I will argue that publishing to PDF is too, and it won’t take a few centuries to get there. The genie is out of the bottle. Downstream users want the BIM. What we as designers need is a new way to publish so we’re not simply handing them the digital equivalent of a bunch of scribbles on trace.
Tim Ball
Many of the elements that make up a building have fixed dimensions and so if you use the element ID viewing feature to cross reference to a spec item then you don’t really need drawings at all. Just use the BIMX model on an iPad. The contractor can see exactly how the building is put together.
BIMX could be enhanced to become a serious on site reference model viewer.
If we could embed an HTML link into a BIMX element you could access the web based details from inside the BIMX model.
Let’s see if we can get rid of the paper and PDF interfaces completely!
Tim Ball
Oh and I forgot a real time GPS locator built into the BIMX model complete with accelerator so the screen shows exactly what you point your iPad at!
Geoff Briggs
Great ideas and practices in the advance of digital delivery. But when pondering Tim’s idea of expanded BIMx, or some other form of model sharing, I think we need quite a bit more. Currently there is a lot of data embedded in our traditional deliverables that is neither graphic not part of the spec, namely notes and dimensions. It’s naive to assume a builder or sub will have sufficient information to construct complex projects without some form of annotation. Event the placement and choice of dimensions, which you might argue can be eliminated if our partners can directly query the model, tell a particular story and are used to convey design intent. For example perhaps a series of windows on the second floor aligns with another below on the first. How is that info conveyed? Two dimension strings tell one story; one string and a note tell another. This is one way we focus attention, details are another. Is it reasonable to expect builders to infer our every intent? Is it reasonable to model every aspect to the level of detail now shown at 3″=1′ scale? I’d say no. Better to develop more advanced tools to embed that focus. Tim’s hyperlink idea is a good one. We need that coupled to a visible 3D detail indicator, along with true 3D text and dimensions, and probably a lot of other things I haven’t even imagined. SketchUp is way ahead in this area.
Jared Banks
Tim and Geoff, sorry for the super slow responses. Great points all around. I totally agree. While perhaps the days of traditional drawings are numbered, the need and value of meta-data is not. A few smart notes and well highlighted alignments make a huge difference.
One question for you Geoff, what is it that makes SketchUp way ahead? Is it the program or the users? My guess is it’s the ingenuity of the users more than something inherent in SketchUp…
Geoff Briggs
I meant only that SketchUp is way ahead in having true 3D text and dimensions. That is they are 3D elements in that exist directly in the model, not simply applied in a static view. So the model can be explored, rotated, etc. with annotations intact. I think there is also some zoom level and off-angle intelligence.
Jared Banks
Geoff, good point. I forget about the dimensioning and text in 3D. The 3D document ArchiCAD is a great solution, but they are orphaned in the sense that the dimensions and text are part of the 3D document view and not part of the 3D model (and thus not seen if you cut a new 3D document of a similar area…). So yeah in that way SketchUp does have a leg up on 3D dimensions. Maybe ArchiCAD 20?
Damian Trostinetzky
I disagree with some comment that said that Hardcopy is a waste. It depends on the shop drawing, but many of them require back and forth and good looking into it, and I think, that even having the biggest monitor available it will not cut it. I agree that it’s a good idea as a backup or as a mobile tool, but sometimes the old fashion way, still the best.
KELLEY SANSOM
Creative ideas – Incidentally , if anyone are wanting to merge two images , my boss saw a tool here http://www.altomerge.com.