The main purpose of defining a set of Standards is to establish an efficient system with a uniform set of procedures that will control the creation and any further manipulation of the information required during the production of a building project. This is done by defining a straightforward set of rules when assembling the project information in our construction document set. All the changes required during the design process must be done in a single location so they can be carried over the entire set automatically by the system with no further manipulation. This will eliminate mistakes and discrepancies in the final construction document set.
In addition to the concept of efficiency, we need to add the concept of standardization; the process of setting up the information in a project must be consistent not only within the project itself, but throughout different projects as well, this will decrease the learning curve among the team members which will reduce overall production time.
Similar to the standardization process, another concept that we need to exploit for our advantage is the ability of reusing project information; this not only applies to the use of standard on different projects, but also to the building model information as well; having the ability to re-use entire information from previously finished projects can shorten substantially production time in a project, but for this concept to work the information from the two different sources must be fully compatible, otherwise the need to “fix” the imported information to match the new project would defeat the purpose of copying such information instead of creating it from scratch.
Unifying the way of produced and coordinated information is fundamental for an efficient and profitable construction document production process. The use of a computing software over the traditional manual drafting revolutionized the entire architectural practice dramatically without any doubt, but it also created a whole new set of issues that need to be properly approached if we truly want to be able to make use of the design system for the advantage of technology.