In celebration of ‘the Fifth of November’, aka ‘BIM Day’ I thought I’d post some ideas of what BIM (Building Information Modeling/Management) might look like in the future. This could be 20 years or 30 years, or never, but we should never stop thinking ‘what if’. In fact, recently I’ve been thinking about the possibilities so much that I’m getting scared that I don’t really know nearly as much as I should.

At any rate, I’m going to post possible future-casting ideas for the way in which we could be using BIM in the future to harness the power of the ‘building in vitro’. Some of these ideas are simply and process software related, but a majority of the focus is on Sustainability through the lens of Biology and Data. This is important because the word sustainability will begin to shift more and more AWAY FROM just ‘Green’ to mean a host of other things such as economic life, building longevity, social connectivity, and environmental interactivity. To make BIM real, we have to understand its place and relationship to the lives of buildings themselves, how they operate, and how they ‘breathe’ and how they affect our being. So check out some of these ideas. I’ll attempt to set out the ‘dots’ below, but you make the connections and hopefully a clearer image will be at the other end!

Form & Material – Neri Oxman – MIT

Process & Systems – Janine Benyus / Dayna Baumeister – Biomimicry Guild

Mass Data Sharing – Tim Berners-Lee

Open Source – Google Apps and Cloud Computing

 Collaborative Process – Autodesk – Project Chicago

 

So what do you think? Do you have a clearer image of the possibilities?

 I’ll update this post on Post-Bim Day (November 6) with my assumptions of possible connections for BIM’s place in the Qualitative and Quantitative connection to all things.