Miscellaneous Diary

Time flies and my posts become more sporadic. Having some hours to spend at Helsinki Airport on my way back from a short trip to Budapest, it is perhaps the right time for writing a summarized retrospective diary comprising the highlights since I wrote about Stockholm Student Fair:

On 7th February, I made a visit to the conceptual exhibition, Light Houses, at the Museum of Architecture in Stockholm. Thirty two young architectural firms from Sweden, Norway and Finland presented their ideologies and methodologies through "objects" and "words". Works were ranging from utterly abstract and conceptual ones to building models and even a book of technical drawings. My favorites were the works by the Finnish firm, Lundén Wikar Österlund and the Mirror Cube by the Swedish firm, Tham & Videgård.

In the afternoon of the 9th February, I joined the introduction ceremony for foreign students in Sweden held at the City Hall. The event was opened by Margareta Björk, the chair of Stockholm Municipality. Then, it was time for talks by the head of education, the CEO of Stockholm Business Region Development, director of Staf (Maria Fogelström) and the vice president of SSCO (the central student union organization in Stockholm). Maria left a 2-minute portion of Staf's time to me for introducing our NGO, SIRAP, and its activities.

This is now a while that I have been participating in information management meetings of a construction project for building an educational facility in the campus which is located just a hundred meters from my office. This exquisite building is designed by the Danish architectural firm, Cco, and is a unique project from different aspects: the building itself is a study object by making parts of its structural, mechanical and electrical components visible to the users; it accommodates flexible education and exhibition spaces with an interior layout that allows quick shift between different education modes. The building will be ready for use by 2016.

Something even more important about this project for us at the Division for Project Communication is that we will be able to use all digital models of the building for educational and research activities. In order to get updated about information management and digital modelling status of the project, I will be participating in two categories of the meetings: BIM-coordination sessions and BIM-development session. On 11th February, the very first occasions of the two meetings were held, BIM-representatives of all participating firms as well as the participants from KTH research group were introduced to eachother, and the overall principles of information management for the project were announced by the BIM-consultant firm, Plan B. In the following BIM-coordination meetings on 25th February and 11th March, more details about modelling routines, information sharing and exchange formats were discussed.

Lunch seminars are part of a share-and-discussion tradition at the Department for Real Estate and Construction Management. On 12th February, Prof. Hans Lind presented his new book together with Prof. Thomas Kalbro and Prof. Göran Cars, "New regulations for increased residential construction and better infrastructure". The book is mainly a critical overview of prevailing planning autonomy of municipalities in Sweden which, in the absence of efficient and sufficient motivations and incentives, has resulted in an increasing gap between the supply and demand of residential buildings is Sweden. Authors also propose new legislative approaches with a stronger role for both the central government (forcing municipalities to plan) and also a stronger role for the developers when it concerns the details of the plans and buildings as a remedy for this problem.

14th February, I had an stimulating conversation with Sara Eriksson, planner at KTH, as part of an ongoing study on requirement management. It was amazing to hear about the way the client (here Akademiska Hus) and the prospective tenant (KTH) collaborate in jointly providing the consultants with descriptions, criteria and measures of the building they will operate and use.

During the previous session of a series of discussions on qualitative methods at our department, I shared my recent experiences from a paper submission with others on 17th February. First, I went through different sections of my work (now submitted to CIB W070, W111 & W11 in Copenhagen) and asked the audience about their opinions on the overall layout and structure of the paper. Then, we discussed the comments I had received from the reviewers and how things could be enhanced prior to the final submission.

My afterwork session in the evening of the 28th February was a talk on intercultural communication and Swedish culture organized by us at SIRAP and given by Karin Knutsson. The talk was followed by a broad contribution and challenging questions from the audience mostly trying to better comprehend complicated social codes and norms of the Swedish society.

On 28th February, after months of correspondence and constructive discussions with the co-author, Johannes Dimyadi, I finally submitted the final version of our paper to the CIB conference for facility management. Our work is an analytic description of a progressive example of implementation of BIM-based applications for administering FM&O activities. The project was executed in Auckland (new Zealand) for a campus area. Johannes is the system architect of the BIM-FM solution.

On Sunday 2nd March, I watched "Wolf of Wall Street" which I did honestly not find as splendid as I had heard it to be. There is no doubt that the acts were great and the extravagant and flashy scenes were compelling; but it was really difficult to believe that the movie served in the first place an edifying purpose and was actually not a glorification and celebration of power, wealth and American life as common to the mainstream of cinema in the US.

On 4th and 5th March, our department hosted a Ph.D. workshop with participants (both Ph.D. students and supervisors) from the Swedish universities of Chalmers, Lund and Luleå. Discussions on theories, methodologies and research structure raised during the workshop were greatly instructive and informative.

From 12th to 14th March, I attended an intensive training course on "Enhanced Personal Leadership & Effectiveness" in Norrtälje (North of Stockholm). Other than useful lectures and experiments on presentation skills, advocacy and enquiry techniques, inter-cultural communication, etc. the course was a timely opportunity for self-reflection and self-evaluation. The course was organized by departments of transport and computer science of KTH.

During the last week, a lot happened here in Stockholm in the subject area of standardization of information modelling and management of the built environment. The plenary sessions of the buildingSMART week were held at Stockholm City Conference Center and KTH main campus 17th to 19th March bringing together the world's highest-level experts from academia, industry and national and international organizations. The main conference session was held on 20th March. This was in fact the very first international presence of the newly-born BIM Alliance Sweden. I will hopefully write more about this event in a separate post soon.