Rambol Evolutionary Design

So I have just attended the Rambols Computational Design presentation with some of my hok colleagues at London's Design Center.

Rambols showed some amazing  work, much which was created using customized scripts generated in what looked like java to solve complex structural and facade issues. It was all very impressive. Of particular interest was where Rambols team plan to go in the future. They mentioned the use of bim as the future, which drew a groan from the audience, much to my surprise! I wondered why? Having seen the funky use of parametric scripts to generate complex forms to rationalise designs which in essence contained rich data about the make up of the form; I struggled why this was not considered part of the bim workflow. Its a model and it contains information which is associated with a building form.....am I missing something here? Not being an architect and just a poor old technologist, is there some secret code that I don't know about? Am I not being purist enough? So like a dog with a bone, I did some digging. I asked a few people after the presentation why they thought it was different, what was the issue? People automatically seemed to associate Revit as bim! So if i buy a copy of Revit I am doing bim and thats the only way to do bim. No Revit, no bim. I argued that if a model, any model, which contained information was not a information model, what the hell was it? After fighting my case they did start to see my point of view.
Whilst I don't hang out in the higher echelons of the architectural world, I am just a technologist at heart; so what it indicated to me is the total missing understanding in the industry of what bim is. Whether people are fed up with the term or they don't believe the hype, I really don't know. But virtual environments for designing building forms which contain valuable data are here to stay. Whether you use products like rhino, Revit, gc, autocad, scripts to develope your design models really doesn't matter. Its more important to utilize this data throughout the design life cycle and to collaborate; each time increasing the richness of the data at the appropriate stages. If  this is not bim or virtual designing, then I really need to go back to the drawing board! So in conclusion, information modelling is a process and as I continue to say, you don't buy a box of bim......