Data-Driven Culture Shock
As we bring the AEC industry to a new, digitized way of working, let's remember the change's culture shock and be compassionate as everyone re-adusts their skills, identity, and mental models.
Welcome back to A Bicycle for Design, a newsletter that explores how architectural and engineering design is being transformed by software and computers!
When a task involves more than one person, communication becomes a dominant factor in the success or failure of the work. One of the earliest construction stories, the tower of Babel, tells us that the fastest and most effective way to bring a construction project to a grinding halt is to disrupt the team's communication.
In the AEC industry, the central communication channel is the drawing set. There are many other ways that designers and constructors communicate—meetings, phone calls, RFIs, contracts, specifications—but these are often questions or complaints about the drawings. Design drawings and shop drawings are the primary, two-way communication channel between designers and constructors.
Despite the centrality of drawings, their days are numbered:
The digital transformation of the architecture, engineering and construction industry pivots around the change of communicating designs via drawings to communicating designs via datasets.
This simple concept opens the door to amazing possibilities, but also massive culture shock.
The first shock relates to learning a new language: instead of speaking in plans and sections, we are now speaking in models and schedules. The adoption of this new language across the industry is quite variable: we are at the awkward stage where some of the players can speak in datasets (i.e. BIM models) natively, but we still have to translate everything back to drawings to communicate with everyone. Anyone who has attempted to learn a new language as an adult knows how unsettling and difficult the process can be and how stupid we feel when speaking in a language we are not proficient in.
The second shock relates to our identity: Drawings are also central to the industry's image: an architect with a roll of drawings under her arm, a group huddled around a building plan on a job site, a set of conceptual plans pinned up on the wall for a design review. If we are just walking around with iPads, how are we any different or special?
Finally, language affects how we think. The language of drawings - plan, section and elevation - have become a system for organizing a building and collecting our thoughts about it. Matthew Frederick, in 101 Things I Learned in Architecture School, goes so far as to say that they also help us express our feelings about buildings:
A floor plan demonstrates the organizational logic of a building; a section embodies its emotional experience.
As drawings become less and less prominent, we need to find new ways to comprehend and perceive our buildings.
The benefits of communicating with data sets instead of drawings are massive and it is inevitable that the AEC industry continues to move this way. As you push for change, remember to be kind to your parents: someday you might wake up and find you're the experienced professional, lost in the next generation’s sea of change.
What is interesting is that none of the new technologies diminish the sentiments expressed by Matthew Frederick. Ideally it should enhance the translation of that plan into reality.
Current changes are more significant than the move away from the slide rule and drawing board 30-40 years ago, that was just a change of tool and medium. The current changes to datasets rather than drawings is perhaps the biggest change ever in the history of construction.
Very sobering!