"Meet the BIM experts" conference Dublin

I've just returned from Dublin and the "Meet the BIM experts" conference. As NBS we co-sponsored, exhibited and also delivered the closing keynote speech. It was a fantastic chance to visit Dublin and meet many of the NBS users from Ireland. It was great to sit and show off NBS Create and National BIM Library and have delegates come over and say so many kind words.

The conference was organised by Ralph Montague from ArcDox and he had secured main sponsorship from Autodesk and had arranged for many members of "The #UKBIMCrew" to come over and present and discuss their experience in adopting BIM. There was a slight un-comfortableness from the UK contingency about being titled as "experts" - however, "you can learn from the mistakes we have made" was one of the modest comments from the various panels.

Fig 1 - Spot the twittererers

Every conference now has a twitter wall

Dominic Thasarathar Autodesk’s primary thought-leader and evangelist for Construction and Natural Resources opened the conference. It was an motivational and future-looking presentation. Building on a number of the thoughts I had heard from Phil Bernstein's presentation in Qatar last year. Dominic looked at BIM leadership and ability around the world and showed a chart from the Autodesk research team. He then spoke about what the main likely technology improvements will be and how they fit against project delivery to give twelve key areas of opportunity. An example of which was cloud computing meeting design. The unlimited processing power of the cloud will lead to evolutionary-style design where optimum design will be possible within the client constraints. "Nature is the best designer".

Finland, Australia, UK, Singapore is where it is happening (ADSK research)

Technology meets Project Delivery = Opportunities

What followed was then four panel sessions with the "BIM Experts". These were mixtures of short presentations, discussions, strong opinions and at times a few arguments - all good stuff.

1. Design - The design session looked at everything from coordinated drawing and schedule generation to the leading-edge design of curved structures.

2. Analysis - Analysis again started with basic benefits such as analysing a design for schedules of doors and flow rates within ducts. It then moved onto the challenges of moving model data from a tool such as Revit into a tool better suited for structural design.

3. Detailing and documentation - This was probably the hottest discussion - especially around the topic of detailing in 2D or 3D and how valued architects details were by the contractor who arguably follows their own practice quite often. National BIM Library came up in this discussion too. It was good to see that our shared parameters for the COBie properties are being used by others who create library objects. Paul Oakley showed off some of his software routines here to automatically do this.

4. Collaboration and construction - It was a good chance to listen to White Frog's Paul Woddy here. Paul was actually a Revit employee before Autodesk bought them. Also, some fascinating discussion with the delegates about COBie and also how to integrate specification information. What do you want to leave in linked PDFs? and what information do you want as part of the federated model that can be stored in databases.

Design workflows

Analysis workflows

Detailing and documentation

Collaboration and construction

Last up was myself. My presentation is on Slideshare below:

- http://www.slideshare.net/StephenHamilNBS

I looked at three things:

1. The UK Government BIM Strategy

How the UK's biggest construction client has mandated by BIM by 2016. I looked at what this means for the UK - better value for money and lower environmental impact buildings and what it means for the UK construction industry - through competition and innovation a real chance to be global leaders and export professional services.

2. Organisational change

How the digital world has changed the construction industry forever. Will your organisation be ahead of the curve or behind the curve? What does it mean for manufacturers, consultants, contractors, information providers? I looked at how NBS had changed from being predominantly a paper business, had invested heavily in R+D and is now one of those leading the way in the provision of digital information to the AEC sector.

3. The BIM future

What is the level-3 BIM vision? How is the UK trying to get there and explore the way forward with the BIM Task Group labs area.

...and then it was time for the drinks reception and then flight back home to Newcastle.

This is what Penshaw Monument looks like at 5am on a  Thursday from Durham

It would have been rude not to have a Guinness or two

The old...

...and the new

And a big shout out to Ralph for organising a great two days