Sustainable Building Blog

BIM and social media

April 2nd, 2009 | by Krystal Sim |

Guest post by Rob Annable, Axis Design

Axis Design has worked for many years on masterplanning and urban regeneration projects informed by successful community consultation. Over that time we’ve sought to develop new ways to engage with residents and find better techniques to improve communication and get richer, more informed feedback. If you were to go back 15 or 20 years you’d find us using drawings and physical models at public events to show ideas and ask questions, a technique that will be familiar to those in the field.

In the late 90’s we started to use computers for the first time during sessions like this to speed up the process and let residents see the results of their input immediately. During the last 5 years, as the cost and accessibility of an internet connection has improved, we’ve used web sites to widen our reach, make contact with a more diverse demographic and be as transparent as possible about the effects of the masterplanning process.

Alongside that has been research and experiments that have sought to keep pace with the latest visualization and broadcasting tools developed in the world of gaming and the web. As we entered the 21st century, experiments with game rendering engines like Quake and Half Life made it clear that first person 3d environments gave the user the freedom to view a project however they wished. More recently, our use of web 2.0 tools has given us the ability to quickly and cheaply publish more information and, crucially, receive more feedback in return.

YouCanPlan , the competition organised by Urban Buzz and Slider Studio last year, brought many of these topics together. Inviting submissions for pattern book house designs, the results were tested in a specially developed piece of software designed to assist the self-build market. YouCanPlan allows users to explore a 3D model in an online environment, critique the proposals, compare options and model outcomes such as construction costs.

Axis Design submitted a house type it had developed for a live project on a difficult site with a high environmental agenda. The potential we saw in the YouCanPlan system encouraged us to seek a collaboration with the software’s creators and when Birmingham City Council and Urban Living invited tenders for a community consultation tool that demanded all of these capabilities we knew we had the answer.

Six months on and the result is YouCanPlan Lozells. Redesigned to suit the challenges of the diverse people and places of community consultation work, the software will be distributed via both CD and online to over 2500 households. It can be used both online and offline to ensure it can be used in any venue, but we hope that the benefits of the online mode means that people using it from home can make the most of both the live updates to proposals in the coming months, as well as using survey and chat tools to tell Birmingham City Council what they think about the designs being proposed by the city’s urban design team.

At its first public test during an event in the local park it was well received. In particular by the local teenagers who instantly took to the interface and chat tools. Making contact and building enthusiasm with the younger generations is often one of the biggest challenges with consultation work so in this case we hope that we’ve created something that will help us hear the voices of the future generations and perhaps bring some parents with them, curious to see what their children are using.

Whilst the ability to consult with people from the comfort of their own home is huge step towards a more representative mandate from a neighbourhood, we’ve always described this as a tool to supplement the vital face to face debates that need to go on. With that in mind the software can be used in offline environments and the investment in 3D modelling can be used to produce rapid prototyped physical models that match the software .

What of the future and the implications for BIM? How can this tool help us manage data about a building or street? In its current format the model and software is a framework that can take inputs and changes in a top down fashion from stakeholders whose roles are well understood. It will receive new models and designs of steadily improving detail and can display images and links to other sources of info provided by local authorities and RSLs, but what of the community? How do we build a system that allows data rising from the streets – in a bottom up fashion – to manifest itself in the model and record live information about the neighbourhood?

Our experience with web 2.0 tools and consultation work tells us that there are tools available to help us and they come under the title ’social media’. Let’s look at a few examples and then imagine how YouCanPlan could use them to bring BIM, postoccupancy monitoring and community consultation together.

Pachube, developed by architect Usman Haque, is a service that aims to broker data for you. It takes information from physical objects that can record things, tidies it up, then spits out the results in a number of useful formats that you can plug into (or point at) another location. The simplest example is electricity meters. I have a meter at my house recording the number of kW used. It sends the info to Pachube allowing me to access it from anywhere and do anything with it.

A number of visualisation methods have already been created by others, allowing me to either simply display the info online or feed it into other tools such as the AMEE carbon emissions calculator, letting me know how many tonnes (gulp!) of carbon I’m churning out.

Another social media tool that takes simple inputs and creates powerful outputs is Twitter. Unless you’ve been living under a particularly analogue rock lately, you’ll have probably heard of this web site. Twitter simply wants you to tell it what you’re doing. No, really, that’s it. Just tell it what you’re doing and do it within 140 characters. I’ve been using it for a couple of years for keeping in touch with like-minded architects and bloggers and more recently using it as a tool for dispatching the lyrics of one of my favourite bands one line at a time.

Others, like Andy Stanford-Clark from IBM, have found  ways to use it for recording more than just bon mots and satirical one liners. By plugging it into all the activities around the house Andy has found a way to make his home twitter. A live feed of building information as devices switch on, doors open and phones ring.

Mapping is an important part of information modelling; the data is most useful when tied accurately to location. However, mapping can be a prohibitive field as commercial restrictions can often make extensive availaibility and re-use of map information costly. Open Street Map allows us to avoid this problem by providing up to date maps that are completely free to use and adapt. The wikipedia of mapping, Open Street Map is by the people and for the people, created by volunteers with GPS devices all over the world. Its open source nature allows us to look at ways of combining the info with other tools such as phonecam sites like moblog.co.uk or flickr.com.

Marking the position of a photo – an option increasingly done automatically by some phone models – allows us to track the latest events and activities in a neighbourhood visually. This has been succesfully developed, alongside other services such as planning alerts and transport links, by Tom Chance and Thomas Wood and their interactive map of Sutton.

Tools like these will turn platforms like YouCanPlan into a virtual environment augmented by reality. By allowing the model to plug into other information modelling systems the buildings will convey live information about the current state of a house or street or neighbourhood. The data shown in the model will help local authorties record and assess public information, and the residents will be able to keep in touch with the activities of friends and family and show landlords and local authorities what the most pressing issues are right now. The recording and public display of energy information for a household introduces the possibility of encouraged energy saving through competition. Who has saved the most money in the street this week? Who has created the most carbon?

The successful reduction of carbon emissions in the built environment to meet the targets of 2050 is entirely dependent on an improvement in performance informed by regular post-occupancy monitoring. BIM can continue to play a vital role in this process beyond the completion of the construction and there are powerful social media tools available to help make it happen.

A creative approach to the field and an open mind to the power of open data formats will help the profession to share knowledge and avoid the usual debates about interoperability. We need to improve the communication between the designers and users throughout the life of the building, not just as we hand over the keys.
 
Originally presented at Ecobuild, the full slideshow can be viewed online . The original concept for the ideas presented here can be found on Dan Hill’s blog, cityofsound.com as well as subsequent notes of my own at no2self.net . If you’d like to learm more about this emerging field I also recommend you explore the ideas coming out of groups such as be2camp and homecamp .