The industry is reinventing how design and construction happen but to do this all parties must be involved as early as possible in the project, ideally when the client is beginning to conceive the business problem they must solve.
We have too many non-interoperable systems and ecosystems.Our current decisions are based on cost, rather than value and outcomes.
Initial capital costs and whole-life costs will always be important, but all of the various value metrics and value drivers need to be considered alongside them..Therefore, another solution which might evolve in the process of transforming construction would be the creation of a digital marketplace.Such a scenario would stipulate certain quality and ethical thresholds for supplier participation.
It could be similar to an Amazon model, but with products, sub-assemblies and systems supporting and providing value-driven data.The data would reflect jobs supported, social value delivered, net-zero carbon emissions facilitated, safety promoted, as well as compliance with regulations and standards..
Staying focused: collaboration, disruption & diversification.
The benefits of transforming construction will be enormous, but it won’t happen overnight.At Bryden Wood we have, over time, developed a cross-disciplinary approach in response to this reality and the need to design towards the process – to rationalise, coordinate and develop a fully integrated design solution.
Our team includes technologists, designers, architects, engineers and analysts, because it’s vital that we apply these new principles throughout.To begin with a traditional design process and then, at a later stage, attempt to retrofit some form of DfMA means compromising the design to make it fit the system, or creating a non-optimised, inefficient system – resulting in a disadvantaged built asset.. Kit-of-parts architecture.
In addition, where the design and construction industry tends to focus on the differences between sectors - segmenting itself into deep specialisms and viewing particular elements in isolation, we must instead switch our focus to commonality, anchoring the design and build process in similarities, not differences.P-DfMA achieves this goal.