The way we work will change.

By Jason Skidmore

The recent release of Design Review Mobile for the iPad and iPhone has sparked my interest in how technology is being used within the industry and how it may change the industry. This puts BIM in the hands of those in the field so they can review things on the go. Previously AutoCADWS was the premiere mobile app to review documents on. This just didn’t suffice for those who use BIM software. The amount of information and ease of access to information in this way is incredible. In my mind, someone in the office can change the building while a person in the field gets the revisions in real time. Advancements in technology have always enabled us to do things quicker and more efficiently. Holding an iPad is much easier than holding any other media that could possibly be used to view the same information. If a company can take the software being developed for the iPad and iPhone and integrate it into the way they do business, I think it will help them cope with the changes that are imminently coming to the world of computers. It not only is easier to use products like the iPad it also will eventually save a company money by decreasing the amount of traditional paper plots. I believe eventually everything we do on paper will be more easily done digitally. Red marking, sketching, modeling, collaboration, etc… If you can name an aspect of design, technology most likely has an answer for it. Another piece of technology that is picking up steam in the industry is cloud computing. An example would be Autodesk Project Neon. This enables a person to send a 3D view from Revit to Autodesk to have it rendered quickly without using any resources from your personal work station. This is important because it frees up your computer for other tasks instead of waiting for hours for a rendering to complete. I have not used this product yet personally, but I plan on using it sometime this Fall. Some other cloud based products Autodesk offers are; eTransmit, Project Freewheel, Project Galileo, Project Photofly, Project Spark, and Project Quickshare. All of these cloud based softwares are definitely worth looking into and at the least, trying out.

http://labs.autodesk.com/aec/
http://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/design-review-mobile/id459112753?mt=8