This is a visual response to an interesting blog post by AProf. Randy Deutsch on ‘BIM + Integrated Design‘. The utterly enjoyable post reminded me of a dilemma I faced a few years back when I started to investigate BIM’s underlying knowledge structures beyond the software tools which enable it. To cut a very long story short, my journey led me to ‘meaning hierarchies’ and DIKUW (Data, Information, Knowledge, Understanding and Wisdom) as one method of understanding and – more importantly – delimiting BIM. I then summarized my findings through a couple of boring pages and the knowledge model below:
Figure 1. Using DIKUW to understand and delimit BIM
When it comes to intuition, I take Gladwell’s side in this and consider intuition (or ‘rapid cognition’ as he puts it in Blink) to be a ‘hidden’ accumulation of experience, a factor which enables near-immediate human understanding. Using this definition, I’m afraid there is no room for intuition in systems and surely not in BIM.