Based in the UK I am surprised at the comment: “Most everyone in the AEC industry by now knows that the purpose of a building information model (BIM) is to generate and manage building data during its lifecycle”  The purpose and understanding of BIM here is very low and still regarded by the majority of the industry as a big innovative step, something for the future!

However its the thread of intuition that strikes a chord with my thinking on complexity, chaos thinking, facilities management and social media.

One of the main elements of complexity thinking is the notion of emergence, and that often emergence in directions not expected. As BIM matures and becomes more encompassing, so will the emergent uses and benefits. Hence managing or dealing with emergence comes close your thoughts on intuition.

I have been pushing the concept of FIM (Facilities Information Model) for a while, the argument being that the facility (ie building in use) is a higher level model to which a BIM (ie the creation of new buildings or facilities) is a subset.

A FiM (Facilities Intuition Model) could include the softer, POE, end user datasets and feelings. What is fascinating here is exploratory work of understanding facility users emotions and comments from social media such as twitter and foursquare. Start to wrap this into a BiM, FiM (Facilities Intuition Model) and we can see real potential.