Caught this interesting analogy describing the relationship between the economy and stock market.
Struck me that the way building designers think and how their tools are developing could be described in the same say. I would say that BIM has been the 'big idea' for the last two decades but now we have something called 'Digital Twins'. Like BIM, designers etc are told we need to hurry up, change our ways and adopt DT or fall by the way side.
Which is man and which is dog? I think that designers being human are pretty slow in changing and are subject to a larger ecosystems of drivers and goals (intended or not). So, Designer = Man / Economy. Technologies and ideas like BIM/DT etc are like the Dog / Stockmarket... darting around, pulling every which way, sometimes ahead, sometimes not.
Anyways, the origins of BIM, DT and CAD before that I think was really to do with automation / time saving. Of course, architects thought that BIM would be the way they would regain their leadership position as digital 'master builders'. But, a lot of it was still in service of established thinking and workflows. I want to build a beautiful building, and digitisation will help me do it.
Now, we find that the 'dog' has been good at opening up and popularising certain concepts or aspects of 'beauty'. Blobby architecture can be beautiful. Blobby architecture existed before BIM / Computational Design but only blossomed when the tools became widespread. Similarly, I remember sustainable / environmental design was one of the most unsexy and hated courses in uni because of all all the calcs and lack of feadback. Today, sustainable development and perfomance-based design is de rigueur. Actually, the CAD course was also pretty awful as well.
FF to today: Digital tools are continuing to change the focus of what designers look at and will increasingly shape 'what success looks like' in today's market. Kudos to Bentley for highlighting concepts like Analytical Modeling and providing 'companion' apps that enable tight design loops between design and analytical tools. OpenBuildings Designer / Energy Simulator and Station Designer / Legion being two key examples. Digital Twins continue this trend, as its raison d'tre is about enabling analytics which of course will support design decisions, not just design. And as pointed out here, context and time are key dimensions if you want to 'twin' real world problems.
Bentley's pioneering support for KBE rules-based (Design++, PlantWise), generative design (GC and Darwin/Bentley Scenario Services) and later geometric constraints (DDD, Mstn CE) design tools needed to form the 'anvil' for the analytical 'hammer' is commendable.
Actually, these days you may need to have about 60,000 hammers to produce a Parallel Coordinate Graph to demonstrate to the client he is seeing 'what success looks like'. Don't know why these cove.tool guys just didn't use BSS + Energy Simulator which would also leverage GC to provide parametric variation and ISM to live sync with the design app ;-)
Digital tools continue to open up new aspects that were previously impracticable or even unknown. For architects, this is a huge change and move away from their visual foundations. In the past, architects were trained to come up with the best (really: best looking) box. His focus would be the box and its constituents.
These days, what is becoming increasingly central it is not the box but all the stuff that is 'inbetween'. Not just the 'space' and light and shadow stuff. That is still visual and aesthetic which is fine but the goalposts have moved.
If in the old days, architects would agonise over proportion, form and articulation, finish and even ornament for the box. These days he will have to look at a lot more:
... not just how the box looks like on the typical CAD/BIM app screen.
Fast Feedback:
Nothing new mentioned above. There are digital tools available for all the problems above. But, to date, most of the tools are designed to cater to separate specialists who sit in their silos waiting for info to be thrown info over the wall (usually from the architect). On receipt, they strip and clean the foreign info before feeding it into their app, apply their specialist know-how on what parameters to use (calibrated, of course:-)) etc to avoid GIGO... and if you are lucky you might get some results back in a few weeks. But by then things would have moved on and the problems more difficult to solve. And often, the uni-directional results are not easy to modify within the analytical app requiring the change to done upstream in the architects app first. Maturity Level 0.1?
There are the usual means to address this interop / live synching problem, and Bentley has a lot of them, but the sheer number of analytical 'problems' makes this an interesting problem. Even for apps with dominant market share it is difficult to provide good interop conditions for fast feedback. It does not always follow that the dominant app's ecosystem will ensure the necessary investment. Even within semi-closed ecosystems like Bentley, the rate of progress seems pretty slow.... due to inconsistent code quality / lack of API and a general lack of demand across discplines who are used to the low levels of iteration and low expectations, I suspect.
OTOH, smaller ecosystems like Bentley's should still have some advantages:
BIM => Digital Twin Workflows:
Well, if the primary focus is on what is going on in the box and not the box itself then, you would be in DT territory and not just BIM.
DT's would also fashion the dynamics outside the box. Currently planned DT's tend to be large scale affairs like the UK's National DT or the Oil & Gas Authority's Digital Twin. Or Singapore's SmartCities-type Digital Twin with live traffic tracking and CCTV feeds. Rail networks, ports and airports, energy and utilities, large industrial sites, logistic hubs etc. Think Google Maps but engineering ready, informed by live info from drones and low-cost pebble sat constellations, and 3d. Most of the content would be scanned in and not built up from BIM models.
How would this affect existing BIM workflows? I think that BIM models will need to start in context much earlier on. No more starting with a blank 3d model and adding on KMZ push pins sometime later. You would start your project from a Google Earth/Map or geo-referenced HoloTuber-type interface. Contextual info like terrain, utilities, adjacent buildings, road network, environmental metrics etc would be in your face from the get-go.
And your design would be more exposed to inspection and verfication by others using 'third party' tools. Initially, this would be done internally by other consultants on the team. The client might also have their own compliance team. Cost check: no problems. The client and his funders could do their own checks on top of the cost consultant's. Say the facilities team want to audit the design. They would sic their own routines / rules on the i.model, informed by their maintenance records and procedures. The permiting authorities would have their own digital checks to automate building code approvals. Hell, even Joe NIMBY will probably have his own check apps to find fault with the design when it goes in for public consultation. No one will be satisfied with the consultant's Environmental Impact Assessment's nontechnical exec summary anymore. There will be so many penetrating comments and queries that your designers would probably need a chatbot AI system to answer them all :-)
Eventually, there will be more money in analytical apps and services than in design / authoring apps and services...
Best to get in there early?