This expertise will be showcased by Bryden Wood’s Board Director and Head of Global Systems, Jaimie Johnston MBE, who will be chairing the Platform Design and DfMA masterclass at Offsite Expo this September.
Ahead of the event, we caught up with Jaimie to give us a teaser of what he will be talking about at Expo.
You have demonstrated that designing offsite products and technologies in the built environment works, whether by standardising or automating assets and processes in construction. Is it this value-driven design model that differentiates success from failure?
Yes we certainly think so. We started out with a real interest in DfMA/offsite construction, and I think it’s quite easy to get carried away and think that’s the goal.
But fairly quickly you realise that if you apply DfMA, you can be saving cost and carbon and increasing safety quality. But if it’s applied to the wrong asset and it’s in the wrong side of the country, then you’re solving the wrong problem.
Virtually every client is building as a by-product of some bigger purpose. Pharmaceutical companies are trying to heal the world, they happen to need buildings to do that, but it’s not the end goal in itself.
The design to value thing came from saying if we just relentlessly added value to clients and help them achieve that bigger outcome, that’s probably a business model. But if you follow that relentlessly it takes you to some unusual places.
We’ve literally convinced clients not to build a building. For designers to convince a client not to build something because we don’t believe it will provide sufficient value, that’s quite an interesting place to be.
Things like design automation, for a company that gets paid to design assets, the idea that you work out how to do that in minutes rather than over months is quite counterintuitive, but all of these things are repeatable designs. Design it once, optimise it and use it many times.
All of these are aspects of this idea of saying what is the best possible thing we can do for clients and what’s the best way we can service that bigger business outcome or societal outcome that clients are seeking.
With the increasing use of digital design and visualisation in construction, why do we still see projects not taking off or not coming to completion?
My personal view is it’s because of the way the different stages of the project aren’t linked. We will be thinking at the business strategic briefing stage about the outcome. The way that traditionally projects are procured, it’s a very linear process. There’s a concept phase, a design phase a delivery phase and handover.
Those are quite siloed and often people don’t understand the design or the construction, delivery and operation aspects of their design decisions. So people are using these tools and they’re using them for their particular stage, but it’s not necessarily to join things up and so quite often those are handed over to the contractor and suddenly the price goes through the roof.
Or the contractor value engineers it and dilutes the architectural concept to make it easier to build, but they’ve lost something that was vital about the concept that was helping serve the client.
This lack of continuity through the process means that you get these handovers and each handover you quite often find something that was unexpected and stops the project.
So the tools are fantastic, but if they’re not joined up throughout the process, then you’re not solving the problem.
What words of wisdom can you impart to project managers and consultants who are working with offsite design and manufacturing?
We were set up specifically to properly integrate the design process, trying to take a very holistic view and constantly looking at the outcome. Not necessarily the asset itself, but what it does for the client?
I think we should have that mentality of what are we doing that is helping the end purpose and the end goal of the clients.
You should have a more altruistic view of it.
What are your views on DfMA? How have they evolved since the publication of your three books on the subject and how have your expectations changed?
The first book we put out on platforms, which is this idea of repeatable components that can get used across sectors was published in 2017, but the idea hasn’t changed.
There’s more and more evidence around why it’s a good idea and the potential impacts.
I suppose there’s a massive lag because we’ve always procured projects one by one and quite traditionally that’s how the skills have evolved.
The thing that I find interesting now is the evidence is all there, but there’s a gap between what we know is a good idea and our ability to deliver it, because of the way contracts have been set up and procurement framework has been set up.
I don’t think the challenges now are technical, it’s all to do with the ecosystem and with business models.
The session I’m hosting at Offsite Expo, I’m going to talk about a practical guide to some of the steps that we can take to get into this space.
I think most people will understand the benefit, but don’t know where to start, so I’m going to explain some of the practical steps that we can take to really start to land on what I think everyone agrees is a is a good way of transforming construction.
Do you think events such as Offsite Expo can work as catalyst for change in the construction industry? Do you think they can create a more collaborative culture amongst stakeholders in the industry?
I think more than can, they must. Everyone knows the huge challenges facing construction.
What we do in the next 20-30 years will define humanity forever, so anyone who’s got anything to contribute to making construction better should be publishing it, should be talking about they should be sharing best practise. Events like this are critical as a forum for us moving the industry forward.
Everyone knows we need to transform construction. Events like this where we collaborate, share our story, share best practise and learn from each other are so important.
That’s how we’re going to start to transform construction.
