Nonsense Chart No.6 by 1chord & a fib.

A national survey by the Structural Engineering Institute (SEI) in collaboration with SEAoT and CASE on the topic of Building Information Modeling.

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/SEIBIM-survey2011

For those of you keeping a tally, last month we had our 2nd lecture in a series of Tocci hosted lectures that focus on transformative ideas in the AEC industry. We were very honored to have had the very pioneer of the IPD contract – Howard Ashcraft of Hanson and Bridgett – join us for an extremely informative presentation. In case you weren’t able to make it, we have just posted the hour and a half talk, segmented into six videos of more manageable lengths. Mr. Ashcraft presented an IPD case story in the form of the famous Sutter Health project, as well as an overview of IPD, common myths, and how to effectively deal with teamwork/collaboration in an IPD setting.

Very, very interesting content. Take a long lunch break and enjoy them all, or spread them out ~15 minutes at a time. (You may want to bookmark this page for easy returning)

Be sure to subscribe to the blog or follow us on Twitter to find out more about our next event.

Enjoy!

The bridge being demolished is part of a highway upgrade scheme in England. The work was performed over the course of a night and normal driving operations continued the next day. You can imagine some effective planning took place behind the scenes for such an efficient execution.

And honestly, who doesn’t like a good timelapse?

Impressive.

Photo Credit: Robert Carr

Safety on the job site is a sentiment echoed throughout the construction industry. We see safety messages plastered all over construction zones and anywhere people in hard hats can be found. There are some people, such as Chuck Eastman of Georgia Tech, that believe construction safety consideration can begin far before breaking ground. Job safety can start in the BIM. While giving a presentation in Finland this past week, Chuck discussed a new safety plugin for Tekla, developed at Georgia Tech, that will have the capability to model holes, edges, slabs, and barriers to make the construction process exponentially safer in a future building.

This type of workflow is similar to what we’ve been exploring in-house for BIM safety on our own projects. Hopefully this idea will not only spread throughout the industry, but become second nature in the preconstruction process. This will definitely  take “safety first” to a whole new level.

Hat tip to Virve Juhola at BIMsight blog for the story.

Our atomization plan includes the formation of a R&D Department. Since R&D isn’t a SOP for most construction companies, we are turning to various external resources (including friends, family and Google searches of the word “innovation”). One search turned up these rules:

http://philmckinney.com/archives/2011/08/the-7-immutable-laws-of-innovation-%E2%80%93-follow-them-or-risk-the-consequences.html