What is BIM 2.0?

BIM 2.0 is Martyn Day’s name for the next generation of building authoring tools: cloud-native, data-centric, more automated, and built to cross from architecture into construction. AEC Magazine, 2023: defining BIM 2.0.

Day pointed to three shifts: cloud and shared data lakes, AI and automation of modelling and documentation, and tools that finally cross the divide between architecture and construction.

Where does the BIM 2.0 movement stand?

BIM 2.0 is shaking up how teams are thinking about building design - but no one feels AEC has had its big upending yet. The first two signals are becoming table stakes. Cloud tools are the standard. Automation is showing up everywhere. The handoff is still in limbo: designers still design, and builders still work in an Excel sheet somewhere else.

The open item in Day’s definition is the last one: tools that cross from design into construction. It’s the most untouched because it’s clearly the hardest. Incentives, liability, and fees have kept the wall up for decades.

What is next for BIM 2.0?

We believe constructible design is the next domino to fall. Constructible design is building design with cost and construction feasibility in the same loop. Design and preconstruction share one grounded model. When the design moves, the quantities and cost move with it — instead of a builder tracing a dead file after the fact.

Many failed tools have aimed at this and fell short so at Arcol we articulated why our stance is different. Our version of this has three key legs that stand it up.

Hedges > Walls

Ask any designer or builder to show you scars of past projects and it’s obvious why some division is necessary. Constructible design means that a builder can see, annotate, and flag concerns in the live design — cost, quantities, constructibility, with the design team alone owns design intent and the liability that comes with it. Neither side authors the other’s deliverable. That is a hedge, not a wall: you can work over it without moving house.

Accessible tools

If construction has to learn the designer’s authoring tool just to participate it will never work. BIM 1.0 was a workflow for coordinated detailed drawings and it forced everyone to join or be walled out. Builders need the model in their language; quantities, assemblies, supply chain, but they shouldn’t need a whole new design tool to access this. If the entire workflow is dictated around a siloed tool, history will simply repeat itself.

Agentic workflows

Adding agents to this new foundation supercharges everyone. Specialized agents can pull historical cost data, instantiate product choices from product websites, orchestrate building performance analysis, and take care of the tedium of AEC. This frees up the team to do the things they joined the industry to do, and in a shared environment that benefits everyone.

What changes with constructible design?

The design intent and the construction intent become coupled from the very start of the project. Designers still work in a real design environment built for modern teams. A change on either side hits the other.

That is how BIM 2.0’s unfinished item actually gets finished.