Having attended Autodesk University in Las Vegas this week, I’m immersed in the idea of model-based design. The concept is a paradigm shift for the AEC community as it breaks free of the drawing-oriented design process toward an intelligent model that informs all phases of a building’s life and is acted upon by all of the disciplines that are involved in the process. The idea that informs this is Building Information Modeling (BIM), which is basically a GIS for a building. BIM introduces a database to store all details and components of the building as well as the domain knowledge of a team of collaborators.

GIS has always been about the aggregation of policy-oriented details about our planet. The very first GIS, the Canadian Geographic Information System, was a necessary step to pull together nationwide-scale land use planning by the central government to inform social, economic and environmental decisions. As such, the GIS became the repository of details about agricultural suitability, the details about natural resources exploitation and management, and a means to gauge the demographics of the populace as well as the potential impacts of policy decisions on society.

In much the same way that BIM is about extending the collaboration process to make the best possible building as a holistic design exercise, GIS has the same process and outcome for crafting and managing policy for a better and more efficient society. The extension of this concept is that we can begin to build global best practice approaches for eradicating poverty, managing our resources, stewarding our environment in a way that preserves biodiversity, and adapting together to the climate and resource scarcity issues that face our finite planet.

The concept of GIS addresses all elements of living most efficiently on our planet. GIS informs policy, manages policy implementation, monitors policy effectiveness, and provides the means of communicating policy success. In much the same way that BIM will revolutionize the building design, construction and management industry, GIS has and will continue to transform the effective creation, administration and accountability issues related to public policy.

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