Paper to CAD ..................... CAD to BIM

Remember the days when all the drawings and drafting was done on paper and to make one simple change required the whole drawings to be redrafted or scratching of old sheets & redrafting over them. What a waste of time and effort.

Then CAD came along and took over as an effective drafting tool. To change a wall just required typing 2-3 commands and, WOW!!! It was done. However, the transition was not that easy. There was a lot of resistance from the architecture community and it took a lot of time to be widely accepted.

I remember in architecture school some of us who were proficient on CAD were not allowed it to use for submissions by our professors and we ended up taking plots on CAD and then extended lines with our drafting pens to make it seem as hand drafted.

In the present day scenario we can't think of life without CAD. CAD helped us improve our efficiencies but it still was a tool and not what you can call an intelligent platform.

PRESENT DAY: ENTER BIM (Building Information Modeling)

Again to define it simply BIM is an emerging technological and strategic approach for the AEC industry. It has positioned itself as an approach to address many of AEC’s numerous inefficiencies.

But, do we see the same resistance as we saw for CAD.......................... maybe more.

What a lot of us have not realized is that shifting from paper to CAD in principal was much simpler. You were doing the same thing on the computer which you initially did on paper. It was more of a platform and technology shift. Putting it very simply, CAD just facilitated your drafting.

BIM on the other hand is just not about drafting or documentation. BIM IS NOT A DIRECT REPLACEMENT TO CAD.

To move to BIM is just not about a CAD upgrade but more like a strategic and business decision by the firm’s principals. A firm needs to understand how BIM will impact it at all levels. The primary aim of the platform however is to create, share, contemplate and apply knowledge and to take the concept of 3-d modeling to an infinite number of dimensions.

In my subsequent posts I would be discussing effective pointers on understanding & implementing BIM within organizations, let me know your views and suggestions.