OPINION ENGINEERING KNOWLEDGE
how the device interacts with other devices. The designer’s possession of systems knowledge is vital to manufacturers because, while they have confidence in their product, they can be rightly nervous of the system into which it is to be plugged. That is where advice in the CIBSE guides comes in.
Then came the internet The guides began as hard copy, but in the 1990’s, the business model of knowledge seemed to be changing as the internet gained ground. Perhaps engineers would not need to pay for the kind of information in the guides when it was free on the web? But the internet became a victim of its own success. In 1980, there might have been a hundred books on man-made climate change. Today, Google finds 85 million ‘climate change’ web pages. Like Francis Bacon’s successors, we have become overwhelmed with information to the point where we risk knowing nothing. In this maelstrom of information, the knowledge brand has re-emerged much as it did in the centuries of encyclopaedias after Bacon. It can hardly be a defence in court that the defendant followed the advice offered by a stranger in a chat room. Some entity has to organise this information and endorse this assembly as knowledge. It is not enough to list every search result. Information entries need to be in some ordered relationship. That is where the Knowledge Portal comes in. Yet the world of the Knowledge Portal becomes
more complicated by the day. In an age of rapid technological change, it needs to assimilate the practical outcomes of new design approaches by opening up a direct information channel with those who actually operate buildings. At the same time, since buildings last so long, the Knowledge Portal needs to capture knowledge about innovative solutions that proved five minute wonders, but that will still be around in the plant room 10 years later. Think of bio-fuels, the source of heat for 100,000 years. Today’s industry, spoilt by the convenience of 30-plus years of natural gas, finds it is having to rediscover the refined art of burning biomass.
Speeding up The idea of a knowledge brand is very important in another parallel development: encapsulation of knowledge within software. Software to speed engineering calculations appeared in earnest in the 1980’s. With increasing computing power, it has expanded to awesome simulations and visualisation that would never have been possible by hand. But now, since the engineer can no longer see the workings, the validity of the software brand relies entirely on the knowledge brand that it encodes. The new kids on the block,
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here, are Building Information Models (BIM). BIM is a technology adapted from manufacturing, where project information from design concept to handover grows in a single database structure. Its great advantage for clients is that the teams involved in the construction process have a single system within which to work. But it requires defined objects to work. CIBSE is working with the Construction Industry Council to ensure we obtain the maximum value from BIM-led processes. Francis Bacon’s essay, Of Building, written
almost four hundred years ago, laid the foundation. It also takes up less than 100KB of hard disk space. The new CIBSE Guide F on energy efficiency is, on its own, 2MB. Progress breeds complexity. That is the knowledge challenge for the 21st century. CIBSE, through its charter, is committed to help us all see our way through. But it will need to be a collective effort, or we will never succeed.
November 2012 CIBSE Journal 5
The idea of a knowledge brand is very important in another parallel development:
encapsulation software
CIBSE president David Fisk
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