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20 Years ago I finished my architectural studies, CAD was there in the background and was a genuine step forward in productivity, but if someone had told me that in the future I'd have to pay silly amounts of subscription money for confusing, complex software simply to draw, I would have signed up for something else. BIM clearly has benefits but is sucking the joy out of architectural drawing and it's getting worse. Why are we just sleepwalking into this world of software distraction, expensive training, incompatible drawing files between programmes, underskilled confused staff, white papers and mountains of guidance and protocols? And to top it off, we now have government initiated apartheid between BIM havs and have-nots. At 40 and a CAD user since 1993 I've seen enough confusion and wasted time and money to feel very discouraged about what architectural culture is evolving into.

What concerns me most is that the industry never asked for these expensive tools, they've been pushed on us by software companies and now the government. The BIM concept was first introduced to me on an AutoCAD ADT training course in 2001. All of us on the course agreed that most of the concepts were the ideas of software developers rather than a reflection of what was being asked for from within the industry. By the way that AutoDESK have agressively marketed Revit and AutoCAD Architecture over the past 7 years or so, it seems that nothing has changed. When software is good, it's adopted swifty and broadly, BIM has neither been swift or broad in its take-up and unfortunately the industry press generally seems to promote one side of the argument. We need to brace ourselves to spend a lot more money on software, training and resourses that will unfortunately not enable us to earn much more than we do already.