Phil Obayda Principal, SOM is one of the speakers at the Designing for productivity conference, and in the blog below discusses common mistakes made when designing for productivity.
Prior to committing pen to paper, designers are trained to first define the project’s priorities. The golden trinity of cost, time and quality has typically been the barometer used to scale the pecking order of project goals, but designing a building is no longer quite that simple.
The climate emergency is challenging designers to ask tougher questions of their buildings, and ensure that the selection of massing, materials and construction methodology are minimising planetary impact. The fall-out of the pandemic’s impact on the commercial real estate market is also testing designers to consider the longevity and flexibility of their buildings, to avoid contributing to the next generation’s collection of stranded assets. The fine balance of cost, time, quality, carbon and flexibility is an exercise in trade-offs and prioritisations. Which leaves us with one more challenge to test the quality of the design - can one also improve construction productivity?
The stagnation in construction productivity performance is both global and systemic and is a subject matter that has attracted sustained attention for many decades without achieving any notable signs of improvement. Whilst other industries have found ways to industrialise and digitise their operations, the construction sector has struggled to evolve, leaving only the small handful of outliers able to demonstrate the value of modern methods of construction. The first challenge is that productivity is not consistently measured, leaving the industry scratching their heads pondering what to change and how to place a value on that change. The second challenge is that no one party alone can improve productivity - it has to be the product of collaboration. Which leaves us with the third challenge, namely that every building project is founded on a new collaboration, divorced from the beneficial feedback loops that other industries have used to inform what to improve and how to improve it. The fragmented design process that epitomises most design projects often leaves the task of improving construction productivity down to the contractors, which only takes place once they’ve been appointed and key design decisions are already locked in. If we are to break this cycle, we must start by incentivising designers to prioritise construction productivity from the outset of the project, and to build a collaboration around them.
Let’s start by reminding ourselves why improving construction productivity is important to us as designers. Firstly, the global track record of completing built projects on time and on budget utilising conventional methods of construction is dire, with 70% of projects failing to meet their construction budget and 61% failing to meet their construction programme[1]. Unless the industry radically changes, these statistics are likely to worsen as our buildings become more complex and our design teams more fragmented.
Secondly, quality matters to us. A reduction in the skilled labour force, particularly as contractors are struggling to onboard new talent, has led to an increase in on-site errors, which in turn increases waste, as well as increasing on-site safety risks, which are at their highest during remedial work phases.
Thirdly, and most importantly, poor productivity has a direct impact on carbon emissions. The generation of higher material waste, higher on-site labour, higher transportation (both in materials and well as labour), and higher on-site operational energy demands, can all be reduced from the earliest phases of a project. Once a designer realises that they have the ability to design out even one day’s worth of construction, and all the carbon emissions that are associated with it, why wouldn’t they?