Catching Up With BIM: A Curriculum Re-Design Strategy

What is it about?

A B S T R A C T BIM has been discussed widely for enabling collaboration in AEC professions. Its widespread benefits from efficiency to sustainability in design and construction converted it into a primary tool in most AEC education institutions in the last decade. However, Turkey, like a part of the central Europe, remains hesitant in this concern. The majority of schools of architecture have conventional curricula based on fragmented areas of expertise studied separately with disconnected contents, teaching methods, and requirements. This separation not only prevents the students from building links between different contents of sustainable design, but also increases their work load while decreasing their creative potential. Regarding the necessity for collaboration in the growing complexity of built environments, underdeveloped skills in building links between fragmented data bases is eventually becoming a serious problem. After scrutinizing the fragmented curricula of the schools of architecture in Turkey, in comparison with the integral examples from around the globe, the potentiality of a BIM based transformation is going to be discussed. In order to build a strategy to redesign a curriculum of integration, apparent obstacles and potentials are going to be evaluated, with example cases for the use of BIM as a medium to include environmental and structural information in the design solutions from the second and third year students of architecture at Başkent University. This study is expected to demonstrate how provoking the skill to employ BIM can be to integrate creative educational experience in architecture, at the center of which remains the design studio. The discussion concludes by suggesting pathways to catch up with the growing gap between the global evolutions of interdisciplinary and integral design thinking through the use of BIM in AEC education.

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Catching Up With BIM: A Curriculum Re-Design Strategy * Dr. ECE KUMKALE ACIKGOZ Başkent University, Faculty of Fine Arts, Design and Architecture, Department of Architecture, Ankara, Turkey E mail: eacikgoz@baskent.edu.tr A B S T R A C T BIM has been discussed widely for enabling collaboration in AEC professions. Its widespread benefits from efficiency to sustainability in design and construction converted it into a primary tool in most AEC education institutions in the last decade. However, Turkey, like a part of the central Europe, remains hesitant in this concern. The majority of schools of architecture have conventional curricula based on fragmented areas of expertise studied separately with disconnected contents, teaching methods, and requirements. This separation not only prevents the students from building links between different contents of sustainable design, but also increases their work load while decreasing their creative potential. Regarding the necessity for collaboration in the growing complexity of built environments, underdeveloped skills in building links between fragmented data bases is eventually becoming a serious problem. After scrutinizing the fragmented curricula of the schools of architecture in Turkey, in comparison with the integral examples from around the globe, the potentiality of a BIM based transformation is going to be discussed. In order to build a strategy to redesign a curriculum of integration, apparent obstacles and potentials are going to be evaluated, with example cases for the use of BIM as a medium to include environmental and structural information in the design solutions from the second and third year students of architecture at Başkent University. This study is expected to demonstrate how provoking the skill to employ BIM can be to integrate creative educational experience in architecture, at the center of which remains the design studio. The discussion concludes by suggesting pathways to catch up with the growing gap between the global evolutions of interdisciplinary and integral design thinking through the use of BIM in AEC education. CONTEMPORARY URBAN AFFAIRS (2018), 2(3), 40-48. https://doi.org/10.25034/ijcua.2018.4717 Copyright © 2018 Contemporary Urban Affairs. All rights reserved. www.ijcua.com 1. Introduction There is a consensus that BIM and its adoption provided a shift in AEC professions (Azhar et al., 2015), which would yield to the transformation of the higher education of AEC disciplines (Briscoe, 2016; Scheer2014; Barison and Santos, 2010; Deutsch, 2017). According to Scheer (2014) the transformation by BIM would lead to a redefinition of an architects’ role in the creation of buildings. This redefinition requires the academia to reevaluate the profession and its education continuously. The requirement for the interconnection between the academia and the profession is even stronger today. Because there is not enough research on the industrial requirements or on the educational opportunities or limitations in Turkey, the need for a study on adapting the architectural curricula to BIM based integration has two motives. The first motive is educational, which is on the opportunity provided for achieving an integrated learning environment, in line with the constructivist educational theory (Jonassen, 1999). And the second motive is industrial, where the construction sector deals with large scale and complex projects and constitutes a leading role in the national economy. The big number of ongoing and future large scale projects of high complexity also require minimized errors in design and construction projects to be delivered in very limited times, without taking project based economic risks. Although it is known that the requirement for BIM experience is increasing, the number of research studies on the spread of BIM among professionals in Turkey is quite small. However, there is a growing need for a BIM based architectural education, which is the consequence of the professional requirement for highly complex building and construction process designs and control. One feature of this overall transformation is the multi-disciplinary working environment, where each profession can work on the same BIM model, separately but interdependently. Therefore, the problem of adapting architectural education to prepare graduates ready for a BIM based professional practice is not only about learning to use the BIM software limited with a single disciplines conventional practices. There are two major research questions that this study deals with: - How can the existing condition of architectural education in Turkey be transformed to prepare for a BIM based practice of building design and construction regarding the existing possibilities and limitations? - Is it enough to deal with the problem from the potentials and limitations of the existing conditions or is it a paradigm shift that is required in the overall understanding of architectural education? The discussion is based on the potential of BIM as a medium for resynthesizing architectural knowledge as a comprehensive whole for an integrated learning environment in the educational settings. 2. Recent approaches to BIM in higher education of AEC disciplines As Azhar et al. (2015) put it, the practical implementation of the BIM tools started in the mid-2000s the technology of which is based on the technique of object-oriented parametric modelling. The authors explain what parametric is, with its feature that when a change is made in an object results in necessary changes in other objects, with which it has previously defined relationships. (Azhar et al., 2015). It is this feature of BIM that made it a central concern in AEC professions, which resulted in increasing number of schools that started to implement BIM into their curricula. In order to understand the current trends in this implementation, many researchers continue conducting surveys regarding the educational realm (Barison and Santos, 2010; 2012; Adbirad and Dossick, 2016; Becerik-Gerber et al., 2011; Joannides et al., 2012). As Adbirad and Dossick (2016) state, the transition of education under the BIM influence occurred mostly as the transition of CAD teaching courses to BIM teaching courses until 2010. According to the authors, after 2010, the process of integrating BIM into core courses begun, shaping the curricula with regards to the industry participants’ and academics’ views on BIM. As the author state, most recently two major themes have emerged. One of them is related with the cross disciplinary collaboration and the realization of these practices in the educational curricula. The other one is based on the in-depth analysis of innovative pedagogical strategies (Adbirad and Dossick, 2016). Based on the general conception that sees BIM as an instrument of a paradigm shift in architectural practice and education, Barison and Santos (2010) focus on how the universities around the world deal with the introduction and/or integration of BIM into their curricula. As the authors put it, by 2010 the integration of BIM into AEC curricula had reached a range of eight categories, as depicted by the authors, some of which occur together in some programs: “Digital Graphic Representation (DGR); Workshop, Design Studio; BIM Course; Building Technology; Construction Management; Thesis Project and Internship.” Becerik-Gerber et al. (2011) have also made a survey across the US schools of higher education of AEC disciplines in 2009, which depicted that an overall 56% of all programs in their survey had offered BIM courses, which had started earlier in the schools of architecture.

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