The Impact of Building Information Modeling on the Architectural Design Process

Many benefits of Building Information Modeling, BIM, have been suggested by several authors and by software vendors. In this paper we describe an experiment in which two groups of designers were observed developing an assigned design task. One of the groups used a BIM system, while the other used a standard computer-aided drafting system. The results show that some of the promises of BIM hold true, such as consistency maintenance and error avoidance in the design documentation process. Other promises such as changing the design process itself seemed also promising but they need more research to determine to greater extent the depth of such changes.