Retooling the Revolution

Retooling is often a phrase we here for factories getting an upgrade to make a new model of widget, or as an upgrade to help them produce the widgets faster.  I believe the AEC industry is in the midst of retooling for the Digital Design Revolution.  Why you may ask? BIM is producing more data then we know what to do with.  We need to become better at sorting though all this data to make educated informed decisions, without drowning. We need to learn to swim though the sea of data.

The AEC industry for ages has revolved around the all mighty drawing set.  The printed (or hand drawn) set of documents that communicated to the construction trades the extents and quality expectations of their work.  This is no longer the case.  The drawing set is being replaced by digital models.  Digital models heaping with data.  We need the ability to sort though the data, gather specific bits of it to make decisions.  The authoring software usually does a pretty good job of helping us do that, when it falls short, when we need a specific task not built into it, that is when we start to drown.  This is where we need to retool.  Accessing and manipulating databases is what we don't have the skills and tools to handle. Sure many of us learned how to script for AutoCAD,  or maybe to write a macro in excel, but how many of us have learned to write a macro for Revit, or an add-in even.  How many of us have learned how perform a query on an SQL database or to link it to real objects in the Revit database? Do we need to become proficient programmers in C#, Python, Ruby on Rails, or the next hot programming language?

This is the kind of retooling I am proposing.  I don't believe we need to all become programmers before we become designers and engineers, but these are the tools of this generation.  These are the tools that will differentiate us from the competition.  Perhaps we will hire a programmer on staff, perhaps keep one on retainer like a lawyer. No matter the arrangement, programming and data management needs to be part of the tool kit for the BIM world.