Monthly Single Posted

July’s monthly single has been posted! “GD Woman” is the title track from 2011’s “Freeborn” CD. Rip. Mix. Burn. Share. Link. Just play it LOUD!

Download link at the bottom left: http://about.me/flattires

And yes – the highbrow among us may be go faint at the knees or scowl disapprovingly at the more base and visceral – but I’ve got news for ya:

1. In his day, Shakespearean theatre was considered to be melodramatic spectacle for the masses. So was Mozart.
2. Spend all your life sweating over a hot processor in the name of Architecture and you’ll find there’s no CTRL+Z on the side table next to your deathbed.
3. Pick up a guitar and try to make it sound like the first four bars (or any of the ripping solos) of this single. Don’t forget call me when your fingers stop stinging.

And why do we love BIM? Because whatever lets you have a beer (or whatever your drink of choice) with friends at the end of the day is really what matters. Work harder – but work smarter. And laugh at all the rest.

Helping Shape the National BIM Standard

One of my ‘little’ side projects has been getting involved in some efforts at the buildingSMART alliance. Last year I began by participating in a group project to standardize cost estimating through the use of BIM. As you can imagine, that’s an extremely difficult problem to solve and our efforts continue. More recently, I was asked to become involved with the National BIM Standard project committee for the United States. Given my prior experience with corporate standards at SOM, I agreed to join.

Since joining, I have been named the Chair of the Design Work Group for NBIMS-US version 2. Yes…in case you didn’t already know, version 1 was completed a few years ago and can be downloaded for free from the buildingSMART alliance website. While the first version consisted of almost 200 pages dedicated to introducing the work of the NBIMS committee and the scope of BIM, it did start to address some key concepts towards the standardization of this oft misunderstood paradigm.

Definition of BIM – Let’s all agree on what “building information modeling” really means, shall we? NBIMS v1 describes it as “a product…a process…and a result.”

Importance of Data Models – Quite a worthwhile chapter for the technologists among us, but this sets the stage for adopting the IFC data model. Notice I said ‘data model’ and not ‘file format.’ this will start to open the discussions concerning model servers instead of interoperability of proprietary file formats.

Capability Maturity Model (CMM) – This is one of my favorite parts of NBIMS; however, it is my opinion that the CMM needs some refinement. Our industry needs a leveling system for all stakeholders to gauge the completeness of a deliverable or a firm’s ability to deliver expected services. Well, exactly what services are we talking about?…Standardized BIM use definitions have been submitted for consideration in NBIMS v2, but that’s worthy of a dedicated discussion. There are many parts evolving from this concept that should help bring an ‘apples to apples’ approach to BIM delivery.

These are but a few of the items we are reviewing in the work of the four NBIMS work groups (Design, Assemble, Procure, Operate) along with the Implementation and Technical Sub-Committees. I’ll be posting more about our progress and I encourage you to provide feedback.

You can also get involved in the NBIMS effort. While the official ballot phase for V2 has closed, you can submit a Blue Sky ballot. Any good idea can be submitted via a simple form – and you don’t even have to be a buildingSMART alliance member! Please visit the balloting page for NBIMS to get involved and view the active ballots.

– Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

"Time’s up. Had your chance. Muffed it."

Cudos to whoever posts the source of title of the blog post. Hint: It’s a movie that first inspired my love for technology and design at the age of three! It’s the story of one man that can design, build and dream. And in the end he gets the hot girl with the foreign accent and gruff father-in-law (that turns out to be a soft grandfather).

Oh shit…the parallels are scary.

Anyway – I didn’t want to post all these pictures yesterday since it was Monday and if you’re didn’t go to RTC you were already depressed enough. But now that it’s Tuesday – here goes.

Breakfast at Manhattan Beach (I went out a bit early).

Ghetty Museum

Stair Porn. Thanks Richard.

Dana Point. Ritz Carlton. Design by WATG.

Alex’s Bar. Long Beach. Hoping to book a show for the FLAT TIRES.

LA Farmers Market. The only sincere space in the city limits. Jim Balding has never been here.

Joe McQueen (left) from “Confessions of a Superhero”. Watch it. Netflix.

Converted water tower. Huntington Beach. Call 374-6157 to rent / lease.

Dana Point. Early morning mist.

On to RTCUSA…

Carl’s keynote was fantastic. Ubiquitous | Infinite | Connected

Great exhibitors and sponsors. From 3D printing to cloud computing.

Lunch served in the exhibition space. Enjoyed in open sea breezes.

Friday night BBQ in the center lawn.

Saturday night gala dinner and awards. Sheve Shell doesn’t just dress the part. We have proof.

And upon arriving home? Yes. I love showtunes. And flowers. And BIM.

That’s BIM…with an “I”. Hey – how was I to know that Simon Whitbread booked us a room at a ‘gay friendly’ hotel in west Hollywood (prior to RTC USA)? Anyway the staff was really friendly and probably thought we made a lovely couple.

Sorry if you missed RTC USA. Fantastic classes – very strong and experienced knowledgebase. Relaxed atmosphere. All the Exhibitors, Reviteers and Revit Factory Workers that you want to meet at AU were there. The concern now is that RTC will grow too fast and lose the intimacy. But we still have room for growth. Start making plans to attend in 2012. Location TBD but probably on the east coast.

Over all? RTC is a great compliment to AU. Meeting just once a year just isn’t enough – stuff changes so quickly. Meeting twice a year helps us all keep our heads up to see what’s next while dogding what’s more flash than substance.

And come June 2012 maybe Eddy and James will bless us with their presence. 😉

Time Is Running Out

Do you make the decisions that your company ultimately implements? Do those decisions effect dozens (if not hundreds) of people and projects?

Are you essential to the success of your business?

Have you registered for RTC North America?

http://www.revitconference.com.au/rtc2011us/index.htm

Online registration ends a week from today. Friday. 6/17/11. Or 17/06/11 if your from the northern most part of North America.

If you have or you haven’t registered, it usually comes down to two the same two things:

1. Time
2. Money

Interesting, eh? The same two reasons are given either attend or not. It’s always about Time and Money.

If you’ve been told you don’t have the time and money to attend the next step is to ask yourself, “Why?” Business slow? Resources strained? How did you and your business get there? Have you and your teams all been kept your head down and waiting for the rough weather to pass? How’s that working out?

How will not attending improve your present business situation?

Because a week and a half from now, hundreds of people – technology directors, BIM managers, contractors, owners, industry leaders and solution developers – are going to meet in Huntington Beach for 3 1/2 days. We’re going to discuss Revit 2012. Best Practices. Elegant Solutions. We’re going to share first hand experience of leveraging the broadest BIM ecosystem in unique and innovative ways that improve our business process. And we’re going to be able to talk directly with many of the companies that actually create the technologies, platforms and applications that help us work more efficiently and effectively.

How will RTC go? The good news is that if it’s only a shadow of the conference in Australia, it’s going to be amazing.

The bad news? Unfortunately, we’re not going to be able to repeat all we discussed, learned and agreed upon in all the minutea and serindipity of being there, feet under the table, wide-eyed and in the moment. And to make matters worse, we’re going to go back to our offices and push the pedal down even farther, leveraging those 3 1/2 days of concentrated effort as much as possible. And for the next 6 months or so (till AU 2012) we’re going to benefit from an enormous head start.

If you’re there – RTC represents a gathering of your fierest, most loyal and dedicated allies.

If you’re not there – we’re your competition. And unfortunately you’re name is going to come up. And while your presence would have added much to the conversation – your absense is going to speak volumes.

Because if you’re so very valuable to your business that you’re not able to put aside just 2 business days out of the next 6 months to hone and sharpen the skills it takes to be at your most effective…I have news for you.

You’re not valuable.

You’re stuck.

 

Here’s What We’re Gonna Do

Get up on my stage one more time…

Times are tough. So here’s what we’re gonna do.

The first of every month the FLAT TIRES are going to put up a single. Could be a song from one of their albums. Might be a live video from a recent show. Full fidelity. Not some crappy low-bandwith MP3.

You’ll be able to download the single for a month. It’s yours. Rip. Mix. Burn.

Pass along the link to your friends. It’s theirs. Rip. Mix. Burn. And so on.

Play it loud. You’ll find this music is specially formulated to overcome that annoying “OON-THA-OON-THA-OON-THA” from the nearest neon-wrapped rice wagon as you wait for the light to change at your local intersection.

At the end of the month, that single goes away and we’ll put up another. And then another. And another.

Shampoo, rinse, repeat.

And if you can’t wait thirty days for the next single to roll around, right-click on the track in iTunes, select “Show Artist Profile” and it’ll take you right to the iTunes store.

Oh Steve Jobs, we beseech thee…

So let’s kickoff June 2011: Carolina S**t Stomp. Courtesy of the FLAT TIRES. Hickory, NC’s finest. Established 2004.

It’s the kind of music your preacher warned you about it. Not cause he doesn’t like it, mind you. It’s because that woman that he’s running around with on the side likes it waaaay too much.

 

Revit In The Classroom

As many of you know, one of the chapters in “Beyond” section in Mastering Autodesk Revit Architecture 2012 is focused on using Revit in higher education. This past year, we had the pleasure of working with Singapore Polytechnic.

Founded in 1954, Singapore Polytechnic is the first polytechnic in Singapore that offered 3-year diploma courses. Today, there are 49 diploma programs ranging from architecture, arts and humanities, business, design, engineering to health sciences. There are 1,500 staff and 16,000 students housed in a unique green campus, which has been architecturally designed with landscaped courtyards.

Singapore Polytechnic offers Diploma in Architecture from the School of Architecture and the Built Environment. The School also offers courses in landscape architecture, civil engineering, facilities management and water technology. Each academic year 120 students enroll in the first year of the three year Diploma in Architecture (DARCH) program. The DARCH curriculum focuses on the integration design with technology and students are exposed to the real-world in a simulated office environment.

The School believes that BIM an important part of challenging the creativity of the students into innovative architectural solutions. In order to formalize the integration of BIM into the curriculum, a pilot program was introduced in 2010 for final year students of the fall 2009 / spring 2010 class. A year later, the DARCH course now requires students to be able to conceptualize design ideas and develop into workable design schemes with details using BIM.

The results? Check out chapter 23 in Mastering Autodesk Revit Architecture 2012. But this is the age of the internet, right? You want to see something now!!!

Well, you’re in luck. Until your book arrives, the Mastering Revit Team has started a YouTube Channel located at http://www.youtube.com/MasteringRevit. And please subscribe in order to be notified when new stuff is posted.

We’re not exactly sure how we’re going to use the YouTube Channel after today, but for a start we’ve uploaded 10 videos (over 7 gigs!) highlighting Singapore Polytechnic and the School of Architecture and the Built Environment. Take a moment and check out the videos. The students have worked incredibly hard and we’re really pleased and grateful to have highlighted their work in this year’s book.

What’s next for the YouTube Channel? Well, James and I have super-embarrassing video from AU 2010 of Eddy crying Twitter Tears into a tumbler of absinthe right after getting caught “sexting” a number of world famous architects. So we could post that stuff.

Hold on a minute! It’s not what you think.

You see, in Eddy’s lexicon, “sexting” refers to soliciting and receiving numerous and explicit texts messages and images highlighting the environmental benefits of “Semiarid Xeriscaping“.

“Blah blah blah sob sob drink sob people should really think before they act so they can save the planet one drop of water at a time and I was just trying to do my part to make the world a better place sob sob drink….”

So it’s not what you think (thank goodness). But on the other hand, you can’t begin to imagine the size of the carbon footprint created by flying across the country to drink absinthe in the middle of the desert. Pretty explicit and disturbing stuff. Fortunately, the dry air and alcohol does a great job of numbing away the nagging irony.

Partly Cloudy

Well, there’s a lot of buzz over the “cloud” at the moment. Apple has even got all the fanboys wetting themselves like puppies with excitement over Monday’s announcement. So before Steve throws the switch on his patented “Reality Distortion Field” I thought it best to inoculate you from all the hype coming next Monday. There’s a couple of options (related to Apple) and a couple of implications (for the AEC space).

Option 1: If all Apple is doing is allowing you to get to the stuff you already have – your music, videos, books, etc., all the time, where ever you are…I’m not going to be that excited. In this sense, the “cloud” is just a data center (or maybe a bunch of data centers) at the ready to distribute your stuff.  And their distribution must still pass through my data provider – and that’s a significant pinch point from a mobility standpoint.

Another reason I’m not that excited about Option 1 is that I don’t just want to get to my stuff. And Pandora is already great for that if it’s music. And Netflix is great for that if it’s video. And Amazon is great for that if it’s books. And Dropbox is great for hosting stuff I already own and want to access across multiple devices. But I don’t want to have to go out and pay retail for all this stuff just to put it into the “cloud” so I can get to it all the time. In this case the cloud is just allowing me to get to the stuff I already know about.

What’s more interesting? When the cloud helps me get to stuff that I don’t already know about, which leads to Option 2.

Option 2: Apple is going head to head with the likes of Netflix and Pandora and Amazon and Dropbox and is allowing their customers to access all these proprietary catalogs of data (probably for a subscription based fee). That’d freak people out. That’d be disruptive and interesting. Except they still have to deal with the pinch point of mobile data providers. Unless Steve Jobs’ “One More Thing” is that he’s bought AT&T and is planning publicly execute the former CEO with a brushed aluminum and bamboo guillotine designed by Jon Ives during Monday’s keynote. So just to be on the safe side, I’m investing in popcorn futures.

Yes – that last bit sound’s like a crazy idea. But not really. If you listen to Dan Carlin’s “Hardcore History”, executing the CEO of AT&T for years of horrible customer service, monopolistic lethargism and lack of innovation would be pretty tame from a historical standpoint. But then again, Dan’s not a real historian. He’s really more of a faaaaan.

So let’s recap:

Cloud #1: Get to the stuff I already know about and own? Meh.

Cloud #2: Get to the stuff I don’t already know about or own? Disruptive and interesting.

The reason that I’d be interested in Option 2 is because I already pay for Netflix and Pandora and Dropbox and spend lots at Amazon (and the kids like the local library if only for the selection of manga). I’m a happy customer and pay monthly fees for each of those individual services and actually want them to succeed as businesses. So Apple is going to have to do something very, very interesting to convince me to move away from those guys (and not just compete on price). Vertical integration of books, movies, music and ubiquitous access? Hmmm.

Anyway – this is a lead-in to thoughts on the “cloud” in the AEC space. Lots of different companies are getting excited because their solutions are “in the cloud”. And I suppose there’s some advantages like ubiquitous access and lots of compute resources when you need them. But here’s the problem:

If you’re doing something stupid – doing it faster isn’t innovation.

Moving the desktop to the cloud is an interesting evolution. It’s a meaningful start. But it’s not really a revolution of process if all those desktop applications are still disconnected, decoupled and fragmented. Really just more of an evolution of location than real innovation.

The challenge in the AEC space isn’t that we don’t have amazing standalone tools and processes. The challenge is that nothing really talks to anything else. All of us in the 1) Design to 2) Manufacture to 3) Construction to 4) Ownership domains are working from separate versions of the truth. Here’s just a brief lists of some fundamental tasks that presently occur as separate and distinct efforts:

1. Design: Emotive Visualization, Analysis, Iteration (Materials, Geometry, Lighting)
2. Manufacturing: Level of Detail, Materials, Time to Market
3. Construction: Assemblage, Critical Path Scheduling (Geometry, Proximity, Activity), Quantities
4. Ownership: Infrastructure, Asset and Facility Management,

Once again, there are lots of standalone applications that help resolve the above issues. But good information also has to be timely. The “correct” answer doesn’t help if it’s two weeks late and based on old information. And the butterfly effects across domains remains a matter of error prone, expensive, time-consuming and often uninteresting manual coordination. The implication of “correct” answers (in one domain and disconnected toolset) aren’t able to be weighed against the realities of other domains in anything close to real-time. We might think we’re staring wide-eyed at integrated processes – but in reality we’re closer to staring down paper towel tubes at our own design problems.

So perhaps the biggest challenge is the lack of real integration means that agnostic, “best of breed” solutions (particularly in the design arena) continues to evade us in the AEC BIM space. Technology evolves. What are you going to do when the next “Revit” comes along? Will you have painted your business into a corner by betting on a single software ecosystem? Will you force your other partners in the design space to all speak the same “language” (vendor, application, version, operating system, etc.) before they can do business with you?

Good luck. Today’s heresies have a way of becoming tomorrow’s dogma.

So let’s recap:

Option 1: Put all these decoupled AEC applications and processes in the cloud where they remain broken and fragmented? Meh.

Option 2: Vertically integrate presently disconnected AEC applications and processes in the cloud where multiple stakeholders (designers, manufacturers, builders and owners) can simultaneously access the same version of the “truth” about a building? Disruptive and interesting.

What if we were able to leverage the cloud to simultaneously visualize and analyze design iteration with a real-world level of detail while someone else schedules the assemblages and yet another predicts what the designs will cost to own, manage and operate? Is this just too farfetched? Or to paraphrase that crazy evil guy from Lord of the Rings:

“One BIM to rule them all, One BIM to find them, One BIM to bring them all and in the cloudness bind them.”

Kinda sounds like what Steve Jobs is planning for iTunes. In which case Robin Capper is going to be seriously annoyed. But it would be kinda funny in a Seinfeld episode kind of way. You see, Robin has all this trouble with iTunes, and he’s from New Zealand…which is where they filmed the Lord of the….oh never mind.

But seriously – whatever happened to that crazy evil guy?