Exploring the Future of Construction: Digitalisation and Health & Safety Insights | Professor Jennifer Whyte

We can become obsessed by the physical, by the building.

The other reason, this is required is that we cannot pretend that, even in the more detailed levels of design, ideas, drivers and decisions, will not continue to evolve.You can call it changing-minds or scope-creep or natural emergence; whatever it is called this will be handled much more cost and time effectively through managed iteration..

The design process needs to remain integrated.This iteration is a part of ensuring the design is and remains integrated.Although different parties become engaged with design and delivery, it is the integration of the design which leads to the required outcomes.

There is little value in ten high-quality design packages if they do not interface and deliver efficiency in construction and effectiveness in operation.The integrated team need to be much more proactive and collaborative than design-coordination, which is a lagging process, detecting and correcting clashes.

Instead we need a design integration approach which progressively and iteratively develops the design philosophy that will deliver the value in construction and operations..

All the parties involved in the IPD need to share in the value of the project.The optimal design, which we call the Reference Design, can then be largely created by combining these Chips in the most efficient way.

This Reference Design can then be built again and again as a fixed product, by clients who have control over site conditions, as per the MoJ Houseblocks..But for those who need flexibility, the Reference Design becomes far easier to configure flexibly into a physical asset when broken down into its ‘Chips’ (with more or less flexibility in how these are arranged depending on the asset type.)

By digitally modelling the design against the given brief/constraints using Chips, we can quickly see how well the design will work, and what we can adapt to fit the wide range of needs and constraints involved.This ability to adapt the configuration of a design would be impossible in a design expressed as 100% single components..