Reference Design - with Jaimie Johnston MBE, Built Environment Matters 'In Short'

In this special 'In Short' edition of Built Environment Matters, Head of Global Systems, Jaimie Johnston MBE gives us a sub-ten-minute lowdown on the benefits of 'Reference Design.' 

By creating a centralised and highly optimised core design, we are able to streamline the process of designing and building structures for our clients. Through thoughtful localisation and adaptation, we can customise our designs to specific sites and conditions, ensuring that they meet the unique needs of each project. 

This approach is particularly appealing to our major repeat clients, who have a national or global presence and require efficient, repeatable solutions. 

Listen in to learn more...

To learn more about Bryden Wood's Design to Value philosophy, visit www.brydenwood.com. You can also follow Bryden Wood on LinkedIn and X.

Transcript

0:09

Hello welcome to Built Environment Matters a monthly podcast brought to you by Bryden Wood an international company of technologists designers architects engineers and analysts working for a better built environment Bryden Wood Believe in Design to Value to cut carbon, drive efficiency, save time, make beautiful places, and build a better future. Hello and welcome to 'In Short', a bite-sized podcast in which we explore a single aspect of our Design to Value approach. I'm Jaimie Johnston, Head of Global Systems, and this time I'm discussing reference design, its benefits for major programs of work and why our use of this process really works. Reference design is a term we've been using for a number of years now, where we develop a centralized, highly optimized core design, and then we localize and adapt it for specific sites and local conditions. What we're finding is there's lots of these major serial or repeat clients who have a national or global rollout, and they're doing that at rapid pace. Most of these clients really understand their assets. They understand what layouts drive efficiency, what works operationally really well for them, and they don't want to start from scratch and design every asset for every site because of the time and cost associated and actually to the point where sometimes bespoke design is slowing the process down cause it takes a long time and it introduces variation, which isn't necessarily valuable, but is adding cost and time to the process. Typically what the clients want to achieve is a very repeatable solution that describes, say 80% of the assets, and then they get to choose options as they drop it onto local sites. They might want the ability to scale up or scale down. They might want a seismic and a non seismic version. They might want the ability to pre-select key equipment from their supply chain or key suppliers, but the point is all of these choices have been built into the reference design and we have a plan for how to make that kind of local adaption. The level of variability or flexibility that clients want in their reference design is quite client specific or maybe sector specific. So, to give a couple of examples, the Ministry of Justice have a very highly standardized, very repeatable house block that gets put onto their sites. So the thing that changes per site is the orientation. It's the number of house blocks to suit the prison population, et cetera. Alternatively, in healthcare there tends to be much more flexibility in the reference design, so because of say clinical specialisms, local needs uh, existing facilities, you typically need much more variability. But the point is, in both of those, the design team, the local design team, can spend much more of their effort really responding to the specific site constraints, local context, placemaking, energy balance, those things they can put more effort into the very, very site specific value adding bits knowing that the core design has sort of baked in best practice, operational principles, et cetera. I've given two examples of where this is already happening in the public sector, but we are also seeing it a lot in the private sector now, particularly in say, data centers, markets and fulfillment centers, where you can imagine there are these massive global clients that are rolling out their assets at a pace in all sorts of different regions and geographies. In the UK the New Hospitals Program is using reference design for the delivery of 40 new hospitals, so they're developing a standardized, repeatable solution that can be scaled up and down depending on local needs. And it's incorporating lots of best practice and learning from the prisons program. One of the most obvious benefits is the ability to then deliver these assets using Design for Manufacture and Assembly, platform components, et cetera. But the benefits go much deeper than that. So what we're seeing is firstly, this gives clients much more control of their assets, much more ownership, and makes them much more enabled as owners and understanders of their own assets. We're also finding that standardizing design massively amplifies the benefits. So if you're gonna use a solution, a good solution many times, then you get an amplification of the benefits, and it means that you can put loads more effort into designing that asset than you could on any one off. So in a one-off, you appoint a design team, you go through a typical design process. Typically none of the lessons are learnt. What we found is reference design allows you to do tons of stakeholder engagement, really get good practice, enshrine that in a repeatable design, and then you get the benefits of that design process every single time you roll it out. That then extends into the operation of maintenance. So staff get a greater understanding of these assets. The maintenance team have much better ability to change and replace things. And there's also a place for lessons learned. So as these assets are running, people learn how to use them better. That can also be taken enshrined into the next version of the reference design. So you get into a cycle of continual improvement rather than the traditional constant reinvention. One of the most powerful uses of reference design is right at the start of the process where clients are starting to look at sites and test their viability. So typically, a client will set a site specific brief, so in the prisons example, that might be prisoner population for a data center client that might be number of megawatts, for a healthcare client, that's a number of inpatient rooms, for instance that then generates the, say, number of house blocks that need to be deposited on the site. And then we can very quickly test lots of iterations by testing different configurations because all the rules around how the different buildings or different parts of the asset talk to each other, you know that each of these options will be compliant and will meet all the technical standards, but you can very quickly generate lots of options and then start to assess them relative to each other. So you can look at which has the best site utilization, which has the least amount of cut and fill, which has the closest matched your idolized adjacencies. So already you are tending toward a design, which is very highly optimized. But you do that very quickly and you can very quickly test whether a site is very viable or not and so for clients to be able to make informed decisions very early on and make big investment decisions on sites much more quickly than they would normally is enormously powerful cuz once they buy a site, they're locked in for a very long time. So having that speed of iteration while still helping to develop a more optimized solution and inform a very important capital decision is incredibly powerful for these clients who are often looking at multiple sites at the same time. So overall, this process has massive benefits through every stage of a project. So, in the early stages, it allows clients to make very informed decisions on site selection, right at the start of the process, that often saves months, if not years. The design process can happen incredibly quickly because of the pre-baking of the solutions into the reference design. It also cuts design fees because it allows designers to only be focusing on those elements, which are the most site specific and most localized. It often allows procurement to happen very quickly because you have the standardized reference elements, you can be starting to procure some of the components for those while the main site design is still happening. And for the supply chain, it gives massive certainty because if they know there's a pipeline of continual demand coming out from clients, they can gear up, they can start to innovate. So it benefits everyone from the clients, the designers, the supply chain, site personnel, operational personnel, right the way through the process. And often takes a process that would be months, years, decade in some instances and turns that into weeks, months in some cases. So you can see hopefully why this has become such a hot topic and why it's become such a enticing way for people to start to run these programs. This actually links back into lots of other things that are of interest in Bryden Wood, so design automation sits on top of this, adoption of automation and construction platforms, and we'll come back to those in future podcasts. Thank you for listening to Built Environment Matters a podcast brought to you by Bryden Wood Listen and subscribe wherever you get your favorite podcast and you can follow Bryden Wood on LinkedIn and Twitter