085: ‘The Rigor of Information’, with Wassim Jabi

Special guest Wassim Jabi of Topologic BIM joins the podcast to talk about how Topologic grew out of a need to build lightweight models that are adept at representing space rather than merely components and assemblies of manufactured parts, the notion of a spatial vocabulary and creating a ‘dictionary of dictionaries’ in architectural design software, why the concepts in Topologic have incredible utility for practitioners today, the value of Topologic and the library being open source, how it works and what the existing platforms that it works within are (including the excitement around other open source software including FreeCAD, Blender, and BlenderBIM), making the case for why there’s no risk in using open source software, why the Topologic team is rethinking the BIM process by going from simplicity to complexity rather than how other BIM platforms force us to make something complex up front which in turn makes it more difficult to change things later, how this approach gives the design team the ability to ask the model questions and get meaningful answers, the idea of ‘material passports’ and the blockchain, how digital twins fit into this from an owner’s point of view, where things might be headed in the future with this groundwork that’s been laid, and more.