Social BIM Perspectives

Ongoing change in digitalization of built environment process has been greatly influenced by diverse use of information and communication technology. Built environments today are developed with a more userand customer-oriented approach. The forerunners of construction industry are implementing new processes based on building information modeling (BIM) for enhanced productivity. Unfortunately these tools focus on planning, and their social dimension, are not thoroughly developed to support planning process. One of the recent developments in strengthening social perspective is an active use of social media tools and applications, which are usually built on web 2.0 technologies. This paper presents conceptualization of “Social BIM 2.0” that builds on core concept to link BIM and social media. Free easy-to-use social applications are already a commonly accepted way to share different kinds of media. Integrating these to model-based applications with social plugin to share 3D models is an interesting way to collect opinions, comments and feedback from audiences. The empirical part of the paper presents current way of work with model-based tools and the use of social media for built environment projects highlighting end-user participation and social interaction. Besides, we also present critical scenarios for the uptake of such technologies in real project environment.