Epilogue
Every book deserves a concluding part. In some genres, like novels and thrillers, the whole book works towards a conclusion that terminates the readers’ journey and brings all narrative strands neatly together. Others have more difficulty with the ending, for example textbooks that deal with a series of subjects, like this one. A common practice in such books is to write a conclusion in the style of scientific papers: essentially a copy of the introduction, only with answers instead of questions — essentially a summary of key points made in the intervening chapters. This works well in papers, even if the summary is a mere list of points, but books require more coherence: a story, not a list. Therefore, it often leads to selective narratives that discriminate against some aspects. It is perhaps not accidental that introductions and conclusions are the most read sections in scientific papers, while prologues and epilogues are the least read chapters in scientific books.
I shall keep my summary brief:
Thanks to digitization, we are producing and processing huge quantities of information for practically everything we do. This will become even more intensive in the foreseeable future, making information management (IM) a key concern in our personal and private lives. The significance of IM is acknowledged in AECO but AECO remains attached to outdated, analogue practices that are replicated in digital environments, distorting digitization and restricting its potential.
To improve the situation, we need to understand that digital representations like BIM are symbolic and start thinking in terms of symbols, properties, relations and the graphs they form instead of views like drawings and implementation mechanisms like lines. We must also approach information from a semantic perspective and realize that our main focus should be the primary data that define symbols and relations in our representations, and from which other data derive. This makes the two priorities of IM, information flows and information quality, means for the preservation of primary data and the transparent definition of derivative data.
To achieve these goals, we need to represent processes, too, as directed graphs of tasks and information processed around these tasks. The duality of process and information diagrams matches the social and information sides of management, and stimulates Type 2 thinking, through which we can prevent AECO failures and improve decision making.
Is this summary sufficient? It certainly encapsulates the main message of the book and should be clear enough to its readers. The problem is that this message may fail to connect to other messages students and professionals receive in abundance with respect to information and digitization, for example the extensive push of BIM as a panacea, the apparently impending transition to the magic of digital twins, golden threads, AI, smart buildings and cities: a never-ending procession of easy, automatic solutions that seem to be directly available.
The sad truth is that there are no easy solutions in information or digitization. The promise of a solution may be simple to describe (narratives, again) but, as anyone who has attempted anything substantial in any digital environment can affirm, everything comes at considerable cost and effort. All those things we take for granted on the Internet or on our smartphones hide behind them expensive infrastructures, set up in longer periods and with more failures than we care to imagine. They are often still problematic, as we can see from e.g. the environmental impact of the colossal data centres that have become a necessity for maintaining our hybrid lives.
As for AECO, its existing digital technologies may be not good enough both for its needs and in comparison to what is generally available. More worryingly, our use of these tools may be even worse. This suggests that digitization in AECO, including BIM and other promising technologies, is in a crisis but the crisis is not evident to the world and perhaps not that important. After all, we still manage to produce large, complex buildings, as well as large volumes of buildings, which are snapped up by a willing market, at prices higher than ever. We can see that in the current housing situation in the Netherlands: both demand and prices are high, as is supply — only supply is not as high as demand. There are several ways to raise production volumes but, if demand keeps growing, it is questionable that supply will ever satisfy it. In fact, it may be rather undesirable.
Demand and cost are not limited to having a roof over one’s head: we are spending more and more on our buildings, heating, cooling and refurbishing them with a regularity and to standards that would have astounded previous generations. This obviously improves living quality (although we have so far failed to address the environmental factors in the COVID-19 spread) but also generates a lot of economic activity around the built environment that keeps several industries in good health. Our ways may be wasteful but somehow we manage to pay for them, making everybody happy. Why then should digitization and IM matter and to whom?
The answer is that they should matter to AECO professionals because they have yet to enjoy the full potential of digitization either for easing their burdens of for improving their performance. And they are not bound to find enjoyment if all that happens is that new software and new technologies like blockchains and digital twins become available to them. What they need above all is rational approaches, founded on clear principles that explain problems in full and guide solutions. Once we have and understood them, finding the right implementation tools or even learning to live with less than optimal solutions becomes easy and productive. This is not insignificant for an industry widely accused of underperformance.
Beyond their general impact, these new, rational approaches are an opportunity for the new generations of professionals that enter the AECO ranks, yet unfettered by its conventions and accustomed to more advanced digitization in their private lives. These new professionals need to find their place in a competitive world, full of elders with more practical experience and wider networks. Meaningful, productive digitization can help them as a specialization that is relatively scarce, as well as a powerful means for achieving other, social or economic goals.
What this book tries to convey is the core of such an approach, which will not age as fast as the various kinds of software AECO has been using and will therefore serve its users for longer and better than the usual stuff that passes for computer literacy. Knowing how to use this or that program is of little significance in decision making. AECO professionals need to start from what they want to achieve with digitization, instead of what is possible or customary with existing software.
