Intro – I am Ben Bringardner with Balfour Beatty Construction. I wanted to use this opportunity to talk about living digital.
Before we dive in I wanted to look at one simple example. What if I told you that all your pictures were going to have to be chopped up like this? Study these pictures for a mintue.
How many people feel like they can identify who this is? On large paperless projects this is how we still look at project drawings...why? Why can’t we look at them like this.
Many of us have made the transition to paperless… now we have some opportunities to start living digital.
So let’s link this to projects and the current state of paperless projects. Here is an example from the DFW Airport project that I am a part of. Each phase has 1000 floor plans drawings. This is 10 sectors / floor. We found that though we were still paperless we were living by the rules of paper. What were the rules of paper… how much information can be read on a 30x42 sheet of paper. Why do I have to live by these rules if I am digital? Why do I have to look at 10 different PDFs to see a single floor?
So we tinkered with this idea for a while and found a way to reassemble the drawings into single PDFs. We reduced the number of drawings that a user has to navigate 10 fold. Instead of 1000 floor plans they are now navigating 93. It gives users an opportunity to see and navigate the entire floor with out having to break their train of thought or flip back and fourth. I do not see these as a destination in terms of living under our new rules… digital rules… which rule number 1 is now performance on mobile (iPad). In addition we created a “Navigator” to help users get around.
The idea behind the navigator is ONE CLICK. The navigator made it so that a user could move from any floor plan drawing to any floor plan drawing with one click… they are navigating 1000 drawings very simply.
I realize that this example of living digital may not apply to everyone hear, but here is a quick high level run through on how we put the composites together. Contact me if you are interested in more details on exact settings. We can update 1000 sheets with four hours of work.We realize that this is only applicable if you cannot convince your architect to print the 30x85 composite versions and that there are some legal issues with modifying the drawing.
Of course this is a just a baby step toward the potential of going digital.
