As building information modeling (BIM) matures into the promise of its potential of easing interoperability, saving time, and reducing mistakes, so, too, does sustainable design grow in popularity, sophistication, and importance.
I think that many of us are looking to sustainable design as a natural fit because of the possibility of inventorying data using measurable outcomes for lifecycle costs or building energy performance. There are people working really hard to get good work out there, but it’s been slow.
I think the more communication that can happen on BIM system, the better. There are a lot of urgent issues surrounding BIM, but this is one of the most urgent. There’s so much data and research involved in achieving any of those goals and clearly BIM would be a way that we could track and predict for design. That is extremely data heavy, and that’s where we need the capacity of the building information models.
For some practitioners, having BIM built in is fine and that’s mainly what they need, but for other people trying to get to more complex buildings or in very specialized situations, there are reasons that they would want to break it off or use something different. Then, too, people just have their personal preferences of interface with what they like. Ideally, I think it’d be both embedded and interoperable because there are some people who are more advanced who like to tweak the script and know what they want, and there are other people that just want the basic general analysis.
So philosophically one could argue that everyone should work with the software they’re most comfortable with and the most important thing is that the database remains consistent and consistently readable. You’re just using a different set of tools within the same program. They’re both viable options, but I really don’t know what’s best. We’re in such early stages right now that we have a little bit of everything going on, but the problem is not ideal and the add-on programs are not talking to each other that well, so it’s a bit of a mess.
BIM software has specific tools that are starting to become really helpful. For example it has a nice interactive tool for window orientation and overhang, and it gives you some basic values and quick calculations to offset things like window sizes change. Small things like that begin to help the designers and generally build up the awareness of the energy usage.
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