In the Eye of a BIMStorm

A storm is brewing in Haiti. It's been brewing since early February. Unlike the magnitude 7.0 earthquake that struck the impoverished country on January 12, this storm is expected to last months, perhaps years.

But this is not a natural disaster; this is a manmade storm, driven by building information modeling (BIM) and collaboration technologies, aimed at delivering relief to the quake-ravaged region. Modeled on several successful BIMStorm exercises of the past, Plan Haiti BIMStorm would let emergency responders, planners, architects, government agencies, and citizens view the damage to their cities, coordinate with one another, participate in brainstorming sessions, and help rebuild the country's broken infrastructure.

In This Storm Together

A BIMStorm is a collaborative planning and design session facilitated by Onuma System, a web-based platform conceived and developed by Onuma Inc. founder Kimon Onuma. To borrow a description used by the U.S. Coast Guard, an early adopter of the system, it is a "framework for integrated decision making."

Previous BIMStorms have been lightning-fast, with the bulk of the brainstorming, analyses, discussions, and decisions completed in just a few days.

BIMStorm Oslo. Seventy participants from 14 countries took part in a hands-on workshop to design an energy-efficient hospital in Norway.
BIMStorm LAX. Some 130 architects and engineers programmed and designed more than 50 Los Angeles city blocks — covering 55 million square feet — in 24 hours.
BIMStorm Tokyo. BuildingSMART Japan and Onuma Inc. came together for a 48-hour workshop to design a Tokyo high-rise.
"We have been asked by many of the past BIMStorm participants to start a BIMStorm for Haiti," said Kimon Onuma. But rebuilding Haiti, and doing it in a way that's sustainable, Onuma realized, would take much more than a rapid-fire design workshop. So, unlike previous exercises, the timeframe for Plan Haiti BIMStorm is open-ended to allow both real-time and asynchronous collaboration as long as Haiti needs it.

"There's incredible passion from the design community at large and on a worldwide scale to help out, but there's no channel to do that. There's not even a mechanism to capture the [designs] of those who are willing to donate their work for free," noted Hector Camps, a professor and the founder and CEO of the Miami-based design firm Phi Cubed, a participant in Plan Haiti BIMStorm. He and other participants hope Plan Haiti BIMStorm will become the virtual mechanism to house these ideas and churn out many more.

Camps is also a board member of the , which offers technical, political, and financial support for the use of advanced digital technology in the real property industry.

Unlike typical project management interfaces designed for internal use — comprising Excel grids, pull-down menus, to-do lists, and deadlines, restricted to intranets and internal servers — Onuma System is assembled with web-based, interconnected technologies, accessible to anyone with Internet access. To display site data, for example, it relies on Google Maps and Picasa photo albums. To house project discussions, it uses Google forums. And to announce and track upcoming online meetings and deadlines, it uses Google Calendar. Users may also employ the system's browser-based interface to display and edit site plans and floor plans. Overall, the system has the look and feel of a social networking site