messyBIM is an interactive VR experience built on top of a Building Information Model of an architectural design project.
Motivation: Designing a building requires collaboration between experts such as architects, engineers, and constructors as well as with non-experts such as clients or end-users. To gather input, experts present and discuss with non-experts parts of the design of the future building in feedback sessions. With the digitalisation of the construction sector, the design process is facilitated by technologies that allow experts to work on a shared digital model. This digital model often comes in the form of a building information model, or BIM, which serves as the basis for the physical spaces that later get constructed.
In feedback sessions, parts of the BIM model are presented on paper or screen and the unstructured conversations which happen during these sessions (the messy talk) are later incorporated in the design.
Navigating BIM models is restricted to the specialists who closely work on and with them. In this way, BIM platforms still have a series of limitations.
In order to facilitate the design process for a building, we present here messyBIM - which is an interactive experience based on an architectural project. We augment the building information model, and open it up to a non-expert audience who, through VR, can walk through the 3D model of the building, select objects and see information about each object as well as insert comments about the architectural elements. The application records comments about different elements in the environment. We argue that in this way, BIM models can be opened up and such an application would facilitate architectural design processes.
The project was built in collaboration with Clara Vite, Gina Neff, and Naja Holten Møller and was exhibited during the interactive experiences exhibition: (dis)-Assembling Futures: Co-imagining Interactions held in Bolzano, Italy, in 2021, as part of the ACM CHItaly conference.
An extended abstract describing the concept and process of developing this work can be found here:
messyBIM: Augmenting a Building Information Model with Messy Talk to Improve a
Buildings’ Design Process. [AS. Horvath, C. Vite, NLH. Møller, G. Neff] in M. Menéndez-
Blanco, S. Uğur Yavuz, J. Schubert, D. Fogli, & F. Paternò (Eds.) CHItaly 2021 Joint
Proceedings of Interactive Experiences and Doctoral Consortium, (Vol. 2892). pp. 7-14. CEUR Workshop Proceedings http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2892/paper-2.pdf
Buildings’ Design Process. [AS. Horvath, C. Vite, NLH. Møller, G. Neff] in M. Menéndez-
Blanco, S. Uğur Yavuz, J. Schubert, D. Fogli, & F. Paternò (Eds.) CHItaly 2021 Joint
Proceedings of Interactive Experiences and Doctoral Consortium, (Vol. 2892). pp. 7-14. CEUR Workshop Proceedings http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2892/paper-2.pdf
