The vital art of drawing badly

My journey into Construction Engineering: Part 3 of 3

Tue, 25 Apr 2023 13:53:19 GMT

More diversity, pace…… and sustainability’s next frontier

This blog was sparked by the question “Why, after thirty years designing finished buildings, have I spent the last decade getting excited about the way they are built?”

Part 1 made a distinction between ‘Temporary Works’ and ‘Construction Engineering’ – the latter being a wider activity where the sequence of construction influences what Temporary Works will be needed.

Part 2 explored three reasons why I have been tempted away from consultancies over to life in contracting : Clarity of solution, connection to construction and diversity of challenge

So now let’s talk about the final three reasons I love Construction Engineering.

Diversity of mindsets
Project pace, and
Sustainability’s next frontier

Diversity of mindsets

At several points in my career, I have taken psychometric tests and have found the feedback recognisable and very useful. They gave me encouragement to stop doing some things in my career, and to move towards other areas I am stronger at. A regular message has been I am not the best person to deliver things today because I really want to be thinking about tomorrow. It explains why the strategic, slower pace of projects in consultancies was a naturally fit early in my career, with plenty of thinking time to optimise and polish solutions. Lots of people like me.

But diversity in all its forms is now recognised as an important part of better teams and better solutions. My time living and working in the US, India and Hong Kong was full of challenges and stimulations making me reconsider things I assumed before. This constant mental stretching has proved quite addictive!

Contractors naturally have many people with a very different mindset from me. Sites are full of things that need doing right now, allowing others to complete their work later today. It is all about action, productivity, communication, and completion. A ‘strategic’ plan might just be “what are we doing tomorrow?”

Some introvert thinkers might find working with an organisation full of ‘let’s do it!’ people very challenging, but I love it. Being part of McGee’s Construction Engineering team requires the flexibility to get what is needed out of the door today but also be thinking ahead for this project - and also strategising for the next opportunity.

Being surrounded by diverse mindsets has made me challenge many of my assumptions. We recently designed a truss for insertion through an existing building, and the black hat who would get the parts up the stairs was at the table. How could we have properly designed that without his input? Achieving the right conclusion for shared goals is a great process to be part of in a diverse team.

Pace of Projects

Building design should pass through an ordered series of phases – concept, scheme, detailed, production. Sometimes there are pauses between phases. Most permanent works design projects I worked on lasted a minimum of two years, but often longer.

Perhaps I am becoming impatient as I approach sixty, but I want to build quicker than that. I want to have more ideas than can fit in to only three or four more projects!

There is a real buzz about working in a Construction Engineering team. As soon as a contractor wins a job, the design information needs to start flowing – hoardings, excavations, piling…. The first temporary works designs are almost late before it’s even been started!

There is plenty of pressure, but also great pleasure working in a team that needs to quickly produce a diverse range of quality information. You standardise what can be standardised whilst carving out opportunities to strategically think about how value can be added to the construction processes big issues.

Sustainability’s next frontier

The construction process is a key next frontier for the de-carbonisation of our infrastructure. Over the past couple of decades great progress has been made on reducing operational carbon through equipment efficiency and insulation. More recently structural designers are coming to terms with structural optimisation and the adoption of new materials. Evaluating embodied carbon is doable.

The new challenge is to reduce and then remove carbon from the construction activities themselves , and this needs to be addressed from within contractor teams. We are the ones who buy new materials, recycle old, choose the plant and buy the diesel and electricity. Who else could solve these issues?

In Part 2 I highlighted the diverse technical challenges of building reuse – and the RetroFirst movement means these projects are increasing in number. Demolition is already ‘downcycling’ the majority of reclaimed building materials as steel scrap or crushed hardcore. The next challenge is be to repurpose larger format components, which requires contractors to actively coordinate their work with clients, designments and material procurement teams. McGee’s project in Golden Lane is showing the potential of these strategies.

Could Construction Engineering be for you?

Ten years ago, I wouldn’t have believed what I am now doing. I’d been designing new projects in consultancies for nearly 30 years and saw my future doing more of them.

I’ve found the move into contracting hugely enjoyable and stretching. I assumed I understood construction, but now know there is so much more to learn. Meanwhile the skills and experience from my previous career path are hugely relevant to the way modern Construction Engineering is developing.

I seem to be meeting more people who are crossing that old divide from design consultancies into contractors. As the complexity and quality of our infrastructure increases, I feel that is a trend that is going to continue.

I think there’s more fun to be had.

My journey into Construction Engineering: Part 2 of 3

jtrideas@outlook.com (John Roberts) — Wed, 12 Apr 2023 15:28:27 GMT

Clarity, connection and diversity

This blog was sparked by the question “Why, after thirty years designing finished buildings, have I spent the last decade getting excited about the way they are built?” Part 1 made a distinction between ‘Temporary Works’ and ‘Construction Engineering ’ – the latter being a wider activity where the sequence of construction influences what Temporary Works will be needed.

So, now let me explain where the fun is, and why Construction Engineering has tempted me away from consultancies over to life in contracting. My list has condensed down to six key points, and the first three are:

Clarity of solution
Connection to construction
Diversity of challenge

Clarity of solution

I have always loved Modernist architecture - perhaps that is no surprise given that my first ten years of work were with Arup Associates (1) and Foster and Partners. From the 1930s the phrase “form follows function” (2) was the battle cry for the Modernist movement. The key question was always “does it work” and any added decorative elements were seen as “superfluous ornaments”.

Architecture today embraces a much wider palette of styles than just functionality, and I recognise this may be for the best. However, I still admire the clarity of thought needed to create perfect, minimalist solutions and the Modernist in me finds beauty in solutions that ‘looks right and are right’.

Temporary Works design a perfect arena to indulge my modernist urges. What is the problem we are faced with? What is the simplest, most sustainable, cheapest, fastest, safest solution to achieve that aim? Elegant thought is needed and celebrated – but visual beauty isn’t a requirement as it will be gone in a few weeks or months and replaced by the new thing.

Connection to construction

Some may disagree, but over the decades the design of permanent works has become increasingly remote from the construction process. Perhaps this is due to the increasing sophistication and integration of finished buildings, or the way procurement is packaging and dividing design work. Design can be outsourced to other countries, and the pandemic has further reinforced this scattering.

In an increasingly litigious world, some consultants try to distance themselves from the construction process. In America I was once told never to say the word ‘safety’ for fear of attracting liability. Behaviours vary significantly between consultancies, but some designers seem to try and avoid any serious consideration of the construction process. (3)

The refreshing contrast of being part of a Contractor’s team first came clear to me eight years ago when a designer’s error caused significant and dramatic cracks in some columns. Based on my previous consultant’s mindset, my first reaction was to allocate likely liability and then push definition of the solution their way. A comment by a colleague crystallised the new world I was in. “We’re the main contractor, and it’s going to impact us regardless, so we should drive the solution. Liability can be worked out later”.

Consultants often run from risks whilst protecting small percentage fees. As Contractor you are implicitly surrounded by all the risks, so you may as well embrace this, maintain the programme and get the job done. It’s so refreshing to be able to ‘lean in’ to the key issues !

Diversity of challenge

Don’t get me wrong, I greatly enjoyed twenty-five years of designing finished buildings. However, there were sometimes lengthy repetitive periods within a project, for instance working through all the composite beam designs on all floor levels. Sometimes there was iterative refinement of a system between projects - I seem to design a lot of glass roofs for instance. But I do love continuous learning, and the similarities between each subsequent project was no longer quite lighting my candle.

When I joined a contractor there was so much more to learn! Hooray! In my first role nine years ago, I had to learn in detail about Modern Methods of Construction and Manufacturing. At McGee I have been mentally deep diving across all the diverse fields of Temporary Works.

I’d particularly highlight the challenges of working with existing buildings. Sometimes we need to get large plant onto floorplates with limited load capacity, or we are working out how to maintain stability as we carry out complex surgery above or below ground.

In a new building the designer is fully in control, but with existing buildings you are wrestling with an opponent ! It’s great fun and full of unanticipated challenges.

In Part 3 shall talk about my other three headlines: Diversity of mindsets, project pace and sustainability’s next frontier.

How much fun can you take?

(1) Arup Associates were the architectural practice created by Ove Arup in parallel to the engineering consultancy, reflecting his wider vision of “total design”.

(2) “It is the pervading law of all things organic and inorganic, of all things physical and metaphysical, of all things human and all things superhuman, of all true manifestations of the head, of the heart, of the soul, that the life is recognizable in its expression, that form ever follows function. This is the law” Louis H Sullivan, 1896

(3) I am pleased to say some consultants remain very open to proper collaborative discussions about construction sequences. They tend to be the ones used to having contractors as clients, and are thus more comfortable in that space.

My journey into Construction Engineering: Part 1 of 3

Wed, 22 Mar 2023 19:29:40 GMT

A few personal definitions

Rather like snow, my career has drifted.

A student asked why, after thirty years designing finished buildings, I have spent much of the last decade instead getting excited about the way they are built. I soon realised that answering this became complicated - partly because we all have our own definitions for the key terms.

I joined a contractor nine years ago and discovered what I suspected - that my understanding was quite patchy, and there was plenty more I needed to absorb. Being someone who enjoys ‘lifelong learning’ I seem to have spent most of the last ten years blissfully swimming out of my depth, trusting my intuition and the skills of those around me.

So, what is this ‘Construction Engineering’ thing that has entranced me? To explain that, let me first give my own definition of ‘Temporary Works Engineering’ – one perhaps influenced by my previous view from ‘Permanent Works World’.

Temporary Works

Defining Temporary Works seems easy. It’s all the things you can see on site that aren’t the building! Scaffold, props, formwork, falsework, needling, tower crane bases, sheet piling….. the list goes on. You discover that the first design crisis when a contractor wins a new project is nearly always the hoarding, because securing the site is the first job, and it needs to happen now!

If you study MMC (Modern Methods of Construction) you can see that Temporary Works solutions have been ‘on message’ for years. You are immersed in families of modular solutions, starting with the humble scaffold tube but embracing HAKI stairs, Heras fencing, RMD props……. again, the list goes on! A cost-effective solution often minimises the amount of each product you have on hire at any one time, allowing the site team to rotate this equipment through the building as the work front moves. This material reuse can make these inherently carbon efficient solutions as well!

At its simplest ‘Temporary Works’ design is almost a transactional activity. The site team phones up: “I need a hoarding”. “I need some props”. And you give them what they need, in the most cost-efficient way you can, but each activity doesn’t really have wider ramifications. Where vertical columns and simple framing allow demolition to start at the roof and head downwards, or construction to head straight upwards these transactions can be enough.

Construction Engineering

But this simplicity is rare in dense urban environments. McGee’s focus on projects in London means there are always complex logistical constraints from surrounding neighbours, historic structures and infrastructure. Previous and future building forms are convoluted as architects try to maximise benefit on high value sites. Addressing the complexities of constructing sophisticated buildings on difficult sites is where ‘Construction Engineering’ can be a useful description.

I joke that we should have “It’s always the ******* sequence” written in big letters up on the office wall. In my previous 'Permanent Works' existence I used to believe I understood the construction sequence when I had defined five or six stages on the way to completion. I have learned differently. Ten is a minimum and there are often many more than that.

It can feel like a pedantic exercise to thrash through a sequence in such great detail with the project-wide team, but so often there is that one step that turns out to be impossible, an unseen condition that needs a design check, another bit of efficiency that can be gained in construction, or just a better way of building that is waiting to be found. Once the sequence is truly understood and agreed by everyone, first the design and then construction can move ahead with risk and change minimised. The pleasure of finding, designing, and detailing the right construction sequence is one of the key things that has got me hooked to life as a designer in a contractor.

The other thing that should perhaps be written on our wall is “the best temporary works are the permanent works”. This is where my past and present regularly blur and merge. Properly understanding the needs and capacities of the structure you are working with and finding ways to maximise its temporary role is key to simplifying construction, speeding up programs and driving down cost and carbon.

Some of the most satisfying projects are where the permanent form is impossible to talk about without knowing it is constructed. Deep basements have always been supreme examples of this, and anyone who watched the recent BBC documentary “The Mayfair Hotel Megabuild” will have seen McGee’s construction team working hand in glove with Arup’s permanent works design. Projects consist of a one or two 'Construction Engineering' big moves, and a host of other 'Temporary Works' activities, all needing to be coordinated into a coherent whole.

A climate imperative

The climate crisis means that this blurring of permanent and temporary is now spreading into the reuse of superstructures. The RetroFirst movement is requiring complex surgery to remake buildings whilst retaining much of their embodied carbon on site. McGee’s solution for dividing and re-joining a nine-storey building at the Acre won the 2022 BCI Award for Temporary Works innovation with a low carbon solution that we could not have conceived and delivered without an understanding of permanent works design and whole-building analysis.

The buildings we construct are evolving rapidly, and there is an ever-greater need to skill and innovation in the way we construct them and the way we plan, design, and deliver the work on- and off- site. Traditional ‘transactional’ Temporary Works will still have a huge part to play, but the opportunities for efficiencies through more radical Construction Engineering will carry on growing.

So now that I have defined some terms, in part 2 of this blog I can start to answer that student's question and talk about some of my own reasons for enjoying leaving permanent works design behind and journeying into ‘contractor world’. My first three headlines are "Clarity, connection and diversity" .

Warming up to better data

jtrideas@outlook.com (John Roberts) — Tue, 06 Sep 2022 12:00:09 GMT

Why don’t energy providers provide better data representation and feedback to their customers?

I do love finding patterns in data. A few years ago, in a previous home, the British Gas website had the ability to display your monthly readings for the last two years. Being an engineer, I naturally loved comparing our usage across the seasons and years. I could see the severity of the winter, how it was reflected in our energy usage and the impact of changes we made.

Clearly there’re weren’t enough enthusiastic geeks like me out there because British Gas quietly dropped this feature, and so I got into the habit of writing down and graphing the monthly readings myself (Yes, I know. It’s a bit weird)

Given the rich and regular data now available from a smart meter, and how our supplier Ecotricity normally seems pretty tech savvy, I am surprised that it doesn’t give any similar option on its current website or apps. However, since we bought and completely refurbed a 1967 modernist house around three ago I wasn’t going to drop the habit, so now I have over two years of data to tell me how things are going …… and importantly, are there any things I can do to improve things in this crisis winter?

So what can I see in the data?

House basics

We bought the house with an EPC rating of F. The calculations done for the refurbishment took it up to a high C, and when we add the planned ground mounted photovoltaics (foolishly not added yet) it will get to B. Huge amounts of insulation were needed to achieve this shift in EPC - but there was practically none before!.

A gas boiler provides the majority of space heating, and hot water is supplemented by solar thermal panels on the roof. Some local winter electric heating is used in the bathrooms (towel rails and floor pads) and occasionally a wood burner is lit downstairs. There are two occupants most of the time, occasionally rising to three. Cooking is all electric.

Gas

The first thing that is clear from the data is that our gas usage is very seasonal. There are three months in the summer when we basically don't use fast (but see below for thoughts about the bit we do).

Also, that not all winters are the same. 20/21 was much colder, and went on much longer than the winter of 21/22 - so hence more gas/area under the graph. The weirdly warm start to 2022 is also clearly visible (our frogs were active at the start of February, but harder to graph). All fingers crossed for that winter 22/23 is not too severe across Europe!

Although there are other carbon/climate impacts, the ‘home bonus’ of going to Spain for four weeks spanning March and April 2022 is clearly visible in the data.

The big opportunity is perhaps indicated by the fact we still use some gas in the summer.? Due to our solar thermal water system, we are almost gas free for three months in the summer – but interestingly, not quite. I am left wondering if reducing the boiler temperature for hot water (currently very hot in the taps) could lop the bottom part of this graph off across all the seasons. That could be significant. The boiler seems set to 57degC for hot water at the moment. Could this be lower?

Thinking ahead, we could also test whether our big vertical panel radiators (I'll admit they were mainly bought for looks) can still deliver with the lower temperature water from any future air-sourced heat pump. At the moment the boiler is set for 75degC - could I save by going lower and still be comfortable?

(Probably like most people I have never tweaked the settings left after first install. Should I?)

Electricity

We have more data for electricity, spanning right back to November 2019. Unlike gas, which is almost completely seasonally dependent, our summer electricity is around 60% of the winter figure.

The home ‘holiday bonus’ of travel is again visible with the pre-Covid seven weeks spent in India in January and February 2020 very marked. Pretty much all appliances other than the internet were turned off during those periods.

The other thing that jumps out is how our summer minimum has dropped in 2022. We turned off one of the freezers at the start of April (we were over enthusiastic in freezer provision whilst building) and can see that difference on the graph.

The choice coming this winter will be how much we should use the local electric heating in the bathrooms.

Conclusions

I find seeing our energy usage in this way much more meaningful than just a sum of money on a bill. It immediately gives me a feel for what we are going to use this winter and ways that we may be able to influence the outcomes.

Electricity is less seasonally dependent than gas, and the only way to bring it down appears to be to turn off something that uses serious power like a freezer. That can be supplemented by smaller decisions around lights, etc.
Our gas use is going to ramp up at the end of September as there is less solar boost for hot water. Then will come the big peak through to April for space heating. This is very dependent on the winter weather, but we may be able to improve things significantly by lowering boiler temperatures.

I can’t see why every energy provided can’t give similar graphs to every user with a smart meter. Some people will find this richness of data confusing, and they will not look at that option on a website, but even if only ten percent did there could be a s ignificant difference. Could AI look at fluctuations and ask what changed during good or bad periods? This active feedback could sa v e energy and money for the smarter consumers !

The wood bu rner’s logs have been delivered. The graphs are about to head upward. Winter is coming. Wrap up well.

Is scarcity the mother of carbon reinvention?

jtrideas@outlook.com (John Roberts) — Tue, 29 Jun 2021 13:36:30 GMT

Will we only stop using concrete when someone forces our hand? Two gardening stories showing why we may need a crisis before construction digs out some genuinely new ideas.

I got annoyed during BBC Gardener’s World recently. Arit Anderson has filmed some excellent segments on the importance of conserving the UK and Ireland’s peat lands. They are vital carbon sinks with unique diversity of plants and animals but have become relied upon by the horticultural industry for the basic materials in most of the compost it uses.

Government had told the horticultural industry they must phase out peat by 2020, but it missed that deadline by some distance! Now the promise is to ban sale of peat-based composts to gardeners by 2024 and stop its professional use by 2030.

But the words used by the industry interviewees didn’t give me any confidence that commercial plant growers are serious about hitting these new targets. They will do it so long as alternatives were available that allowed them to continue to deliver high quality plants to consumers. To paraphrase: “if it means Mrs. Mingies can’t continue to get great petunias, then the environment can go to hell.” They are preparing to fail, not planning to succeed.

Innovation becomes supercharged when there is a crisis. Aviation is a great example, with huge strides being made during the First World War, and again in the Second. From the first flight to operational jet fighters was only 41 years! When there isn’t a crisis the rate of change slows back down. The Boeing 737 has been in production for 54 years!

Which brings me round to the mini construction crisis that happened in my garden. We bought a steel arch to grow a rose and a clematis over. It came with a couple of steel pins to hold it down, but they would easily pull out of the ground and I was scratching my head over ways to stop it blowing over. Whilst I try and avoid using cement in the garden, idealess, I slowly drifted towards planning to cast the pins into a lump of concrete. Whilst at Homebase for something else I found I’d drifted into the cement aisle.

This was when I ran into reality that a materials shortage is gripping UK construction. Somehow the combination of COVID, wrecks in the Suez Canal and a surge in home extensions means that cement, steel, and other materials are in short supply. The shelves were bare! Time to think again.

I had no option other than to innovate and, after a couple days tucked in the back of my head, the solution popped out. We have very stable, sandy ground and quite a lot of oak sleeper offcuts. By raising the top of a sleeper above the surrounding ground the bottom of the arch should rust more slowly than if I’d used concrete. And it’s carbon-free and uses things I already had. Better, cheaper, and also faster! Win, win, win!

But this zero-carbon, better solution wouldn’t have happened if there’d been some cement in Homebase. I’d have lazily drifted into ‘business as usual’.

The horticultural industry really needs to have peat taken away from it now. The uninventive will struggle but the innovators and entrepreneurs will come up with new peat-free composts and be hugely successful.

In construction, zero carbon innovation is slowly happening – but too slowly for a climate emergency. There isn’t enough urgency. To really stimulate change, do we just need concrete taken away from us? What might a cement-free basement be like? How could a site do without blinding?

Radical solutions would turn up if we were faced with no other alternative than zero-cement. Some might even be better or cheaper! Do we need a bigger crisis before we all do what’s we know we obviously have to?

The vital art of drawing badly

Mon, 18 Jan 2021 19:25:26 GMT

We must overcome the physical, technological and psychological barriers and sketch!

The sketch below allowed four of us to agree the stability strategy for a complex demolition sequence. The image on the left is not a dinosaur eating a brush. It is an existing composite slab diaphragm in the process of having some big lumps knocked out of it. On the right the rather frightened squarey man is actually the node that some key forces need to pass through.

This was a collaborative work of creation done with mouse cursors on Microsoft Teams’ white board. Art it is not, but in the context of our conversation it was key to agreeing the way forward. The meeting would have taken longer, and the conclusion been vaguer without this sketch.

Throughout my career I have encountered engineers who don’t feel confident about drawing, especially not in public. Perhaps structural engineers can use the excuse that they are intimidated by the honed skills of architects. Civil engineers have no such excuse, and yet they are sometimes even more difficult to drag towards pencil and paper.

I have realised that, when a meeting is talking aimlessly around a subject, if I take a moment to sketch the problem (not even the solution!) and table it I can often completely change the direction of the conversation. It doesn't matter if it’s not a good drawing - if you are the one holding the pencil, you can be in charge of the discussion.

So why don’t more of us feel happy to draw? I think we place three types of barriers in our way: physical , technological and psychological .

Physical barriers

The arrival of the 'one per desk' PC twenty years ago didn’t quite deliver the paperless revolution it initially promised. However, it has dramatically changed the interior design of our offices and the space on our desks in particular. Much of the space that used to be available to tape down a piece of A3 paper to draw and trace has gone.

Increasingly engineering offices have been procured (not designed) by managers who need rooms to sit and talk in. As a result, engineers discuss designs in glass boxes with nowhere to pin stuff up.

For several years my job was to get to Foster and Partners' office a half hour before the rest of the Arup team so I could 'pin' up the week's work on the wonderfully long magnetic wall they had upstairs. Meetings were held in a cave of drawings. Ever since then, I have always wanted that freedom to see the evolving design on the walls. When we fitted out an Atkins office in Bangalore, I managed to cover the walls with fuzzy felt pinboards which encouraged the culture of collaborative review around drawings (and also ended up looking a bit like a soft-play area).

Returning to the UK, I was stuck in an office with three walls of glass and one walls of veneer faced cupboard doors. When I asked for a white board the only option offered was A3. Really, why even bother? So, one weekend, I wallpapered the cupboard doors with a magnetic wipeable whiteboard roll and from that point onwards whenever I was away it became a very popular room for holding meetings in!

I f we want to encourage a culture of drawing review and sketching, we need to reinforce these through our surroundings. Big screens are great at what they do, but there is so much more that can be encouraged. Which brings us neatly on to….

Technological Barriers

The ability to convincingly visualise completely stupid ideas is a major problem in the modern design process.

Back in 2001 I became increasingly frustrated that my logical, thoroughly thought through drawings were no longer getting the client's attention. They were being distracted by whatever weird thing some architectural graduate had magicked up in a few minutes last night. This realisation was what made me go away and learn Rhino. If you can’t beat them, join them.

But one story from back then is worth retelling. I'd struggled to get released from a previous project and the architects had charged ahead with a hotel scheme, covering the walls with beautiful images! However, cost was a big issue for the client's project manager as this was being dramatically increased by the railway platforms needing to be jammed into the building's side.

Knowing that this would be discussed I quickly 'drew the problem' (a phrase I still often use today as it is so often not done by engineers). The presentation went very well, and the client was blown away by all the architectural images. But rather embarrassingly the only one he wanted an immediate copy of was my 10-minute sketch. It was exactly the thing he needed to explain the budget to his boss

Architects usually want to create images that show how things look. 3D visualisations are great tools for this. Meanwhile engineers want to show how things work. A sketch allows you to abstract the issues, simplify and tell a story. It clarifies the issues, both for the person holding the pencil and the final audience.

And now, suddenly, we are all working from home, and meeting via Zoom, Teams and other platforms that we'd be previously been slow adopting. The technology has worked surprisingly well, but its basic use encourages us to share and discuss images that have already be made, not new ideas that crop up in the meeting. It is important that we overcome this - and the tools are already there allowing us to gather around a virtual blank sheet of paper.

It took a while for us to make it a habit, but I am finding we increasingly open the white board. We all initially enjoyed and then got over the difficulties of drawing via mouse. If you have access to a tablet, I encourage you to work out how to link it into a shared whiteboard. The technology is all there, and the ability to draw with a stylus is transformative compared to a mouse. The technological barriers can, and must, be overcome.

Psychological barriers

T he 1987 sketch below is by Tony Fitzpatrick, the Arup Director I worked with for seven years. It is the Foster and Partner's Century Tower in Tokyo and predates my time in his team. I don’t think Tony would have minded me saying that it is not a great piece of art. He was actually not that great at sketching - but he did it all the time regardless.

I can imagine him talking and thinking as he did this because I heard him do those things so many times over the years. And the fact others in the room were better at drawing didn’t stop Tony. The initials tell me that Ken Shuttleworth, Dave Nelson and Chris Wise were all in the meeting - all of them are no slouches with a pencil. But it’s clear that this was an important sketch in the building's development. The photo shows it became a real building, and the sketch has been reproduced in several Arup books.

I have often run into teams that are planning a sketching course and the IStructE have recently published some great guidance about how to produce great sketches. However, the downside of these is that they reinforce the idea that you need to be good before you do it!

You probably first got given a crayon before you were 18 months old. The sketch you produced was probably awful, but your parents heaped praise on you, and it was pinned up on the wall. It could even still be in a drawer somewhere!

Remember that feeling and just get out there and start drawing badly! I love those moments when someone nervously says to the meeting 'actually, I've got a sketch' and tables it. A picture tells a thousand words, even if it’s not a work of art, and they can change the whole direction of what gets discussed next.

One final thought

There is a scene in the TV series 'Absolutely Fabulous' where Edina goes on a spiritual retreat. In group therapy you are only allowed to speak if you are holding 'the talking stick' to ensure everyone gets heard. In the end a frustrated Edina yells ‘How much is the stick? I’ll buy my own stick!'

Sketching badly in its various forms is a designer's 'talking stick'. If you want your voice to be heard, you need overcome any barriers you have placed in your way.

Stop making excuses. Just get on with it!

Lessons from my woodshed: We are all connected

Tue, 10 Nov 2020 13:39:09 GMT

Procurement, design and temporary works all disrupt progress on a very minor project.

One of my recurring thoughts is that very few of us actually construct anything. We are mainly information handlers, refining, enriching and passing on data until eventually someone else digs a hole, fixes some steel or pours some concrete.

As our infrastructure become increasingly complex and sophisticated the amount of information needed is dramatically increasing. Despite more and more of us being remote from actually 'doing it' there is a greater and greater need to deliver complete, clear and correct information to allow the next person in the chain to be effective. If you fail in that the small ripples you cause can flow and grow downstream into real construction problems.

Recently I have built a structure where everything is actually by me. Whilst this woodshed is a very minor project (but check out that green roof!) one part didn’t quite go as smoothly as I planned. Looking back, this was due to the 'knock-on' effect on information under-performance at one stage causing problems later in the process.

There was of course a model. All our home projects since 2002 have been coordinated in 3D - mainly in Rhino but, lacking a licence, this one ended up on SketchUp. It was nearly all beautifully worked out (apart from some cleverness about the bracing and temporary works) and that allowed the materials list to be developed.

And that was where the problem started. The Procurement Team (me) screwed up and ordered one less plank than was needed from Travis Perkins. When they were delivered the discovery required the Design Team (me) to reset out the cladding and floor - but by doing the minimum redrawing needed it meant I now had a model not quite representing what I wanted to build.

But there was enough to allow the Manufacturing Team (me) to get the factory set up in the garage (there was of course a DfMA strategy) and the complicated end panels were fully assembled and painted, ready for transport to site - about 6 meters away. Everything on site went together fabulously, until it came to the bracing.

The Design Team (me) hadn't confirmed the dimensions needed, so the Site Team (me) improvised to keep things moving along, and of course, got it wrong. Evidently my basic trigonometry skills were a little rusty, but it wasn’t until I walked back after lunch that I could clearly see the ends panels were being held at an odd angle by the bracing.

So I did what I should have done a few earlier. I sent the Design Team (me) back to the computer to do it properly, work out the exact lengths and half an hour later everything was back on track.

It’s a trivial example I know, but you see this scaled up on projects and mega-projects all the time. How many times I have I been in discussions about whether the information received is really 'RIBA Stage 4'? Is rework needed? How often are dimensions or other information missing from drawings that trip up progress on site? How often does the wrong material turn up, or components not quite fit?

The higher complexity and quality needed now, coupled with use of offsite manufacturing, is critically dependent on 'right first time' information earlier and earlier in the project lifecycle. Meanwhile you see consultants backing away from responsibility for the construction details, sheltering behind digital versions of 'do not scale' notes. If the information is not useful and usable for the next person in the chain leading to manufacture, assembly and construction why bother producing it? Getting things right at these information interfaces is vital.

One of Ray O'Rourke's mantras is 'Complete Thinking'. My woodshed went pretty well, but I didn’t quite achieve completeness, and in the end, it held up work on site. Luckily the Construction Workers (me) get paid a pitance. On more major projects fingers would be being pointed at the Procurement and Design Team.

The key questions are nearly always "what information am I receiving?" "Is it right?" What do I need to do to it?" and "in what form must it be passed on?". It would be a big step forward for our industry if we could just be clear about that and do it every time.

The good news is that the Client (me) is very pleased with the project. Two cubic meters of wood stored. Winter is coming. Bring it on.

The wrong side of complexity: The National Infrastructure Commission's Design Principles

Fri, 30 Oct 2020 13:13:18 GMT

"For the simplicity that lies this side of complexity, I would not give a fig, but for the simplicity that lies on the other side of complexity, I would give my life."
F. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Supreme Court Justice

Early in September the ICE ran a webinar on "What makes good design", presenting the bones of the 'Design Principles for National Infrastructure' launched back in February 2020. And I wanted to like them - I really did! But I came away feeling rather frustrated and not knowing what to do with them.

I think my problem stems from having written a list of Design Principles myself. About eight years ago, together with Chris Hendy, Nick Cooper and David French, we drafted the 'Atkins Design Principles'. We were inspired by a feeling that a number of pressures - technology, training, increasing complexity, international working, etc - were putting pressure on the design our teams were doing. We felt we needed to establish a set of Principles that defined what the process of design must include.

There were seven Principles and they were all very tightly and simply defined. Nine sentences in total. For instance, number one was "we have fully understood customer requirements, assessed these as being reasonable and translated them into a clear basis of design". "We have put in place suitable processes to ensure that our deliverables meet the design requirements" was another. Unlike the 10 Commandments they were 'Thou Shall' rather than 'Though Shall Not', and together they described the all the processes you needed to have in place to successfully deliver the design of anything: an oil rig, an eco-home, temporary works, landscape, a tall building, marine works……. Everything.

And I think Principles should, by definition, apply to 'Everything'. Which brings me back to the National Infrastructure Commission's list of Design Principles:

Climate. People. Places. Value.

They aren't central to all the things I listed earlier. For the design of an oil rig for instance 'climate, people and places' are not central. For temporary works the list hardly applies, and safety is a definite omission! I could go on. And there is no reason why all these things don't need and deserve to be designed well.

"Principles are the simplicity on the far side of complexity."

Stephen R. Covey

I don’t think that the NIC's list are Principles. Instead they are 'customer requirements' as defined under Atkins Design Principle 1 , and their relevance and emphasis changes from project to project (just like Principles don't). Yes, it is very important that that our finished infrastructure respects and delivers these four words, but saying they are the 'Design Principles' feels a bit like the word Design just got hijacked by some Architects.

I think a set of Principles that define how design should be carried out is vital. If you have followed the news coming out of the Grenfell enquiry you can see a process that has been pulled apart over the years to the point where our industry has been regularly delivering projects with gaps, overspend, technical errors and under-performance. It is clear that the process and management of design needs be talked about, debated, taught and better defined.

Climate, people, places and value are all very important but listing them won't actually help us deliver what the future needs. I think we need to recognise and embrace some much more mundane Design Principles that will actually realise projects with those four words as central requirements.

Of course, the word 'Design' itself is central to the problem. The NIC want to define it one way. I want to define it another. Even in my grumpy state at the end of the webinar I was charmed by Hanif Kara's presentation. He quoted John Heskett: "Design is to design a design to produce a design". The word is appallingly ambiguous!

We are all trying to nail a jelly to a wall, and it is very important that it sticks.

Errors on a terrible day

Mon, 13 Jul 2020 19:40:55 GMT

The importance of job culture for site safety

(This is a reblog from seven years ago to mark the 21st anniversary of the collapse of Big Blue, at Miller Park Stadium, Milwaukee, and the deaths of three ironworkers. I wrote this in 2013 after seeing news of a similar deadly accident before the Brazilian World Cup. This blog was later published in New Civil Engineer and several people have used this as safety moments or other training.)

This weekend's shocking news footage of the crane collapse at Sao Paulo's World Cup Stadium skipped past the names of the two construction workers killed and moved straight on to the problems it may cause to next summer's football fest.

The sight of that crane wrapped around the stadium sent a shiver down my spine and took me straight back to the worst day of my career in construction. Crane accidents are often 'construction related' so it is tempting to think that the work of designers is not linked. But are these deaths linked to projects that are behind programme against a deadline that cannot be missed? How does our work as designers influence job culture and how can we help reduce the risk of these errors happening, particularly when faced with tough programme deadlines?

In the late 1990s, I was on site in Milwaukee, USA, where the 180m span retractable stadium roof designed by my team was under construction. Dominating the construction site was 'Big Blue', a mobile crane that had turned up on 60 trucks, taken 40 days to build, and was now lifting 400-ton roof sections 400 feet into the air. Since I was not often on site, I had wanted to see a lift happen, but we were told it was too windy. It wouldn't happen.

That afternoon we were in the site huts around half a mile from the stadium when there was the most terrible sound I have ever heard. It was the sound of 2,000 tonnes of steel falling in into the stadium. Hundreds of truss members buckling and being ripped apart. Perhaps it went on for 15 seconds, but it felt like it lasted forever. Strangely the sound of a car on gravel still reminds me of it - for the first few years afterwards I would literally freeze when I heard that sound unexpectedly.

Instantly we all knew that the sub-contractor had pressed ahead with the lift and the crane had dropped its load into the stadium, bringing down half the building's roof into the bowl. Once we stopped staring opened mouthed at each other we ran outside and Big Blue, the crane that had dominated the city skyline, was gone.

And it had brought down a smaller crane assisting the lift, and in its basket were Jerome Starr, Jeffrey Wischer and William DeGraves who fell 400 feet to their deaths.

The police cordoned off the site as a crime scene, but late that night I was called onto the field to provide some drawings for the District Attorney. Under the floodlights one side of the stadium, 'left-field', looked stunning, spanning 180m. Perfect. Just as we had designed it. Turning around, the right-field was a twisted mass of metal – 2,000 tonnes of scrap.

And here was the outline of a body drawn on the gravel. We've all seen these in police dramas - they are almost a cliché. But the powerful absence of the man who had lain there is what I will always remember. I can't begin to imagine what that absence meant and means for his family and friends.

As unfortunately seems inevitable a protracted court case followed. Eventually this concluded that poor decisions by a few key individuals on site were the primary cause. I recall from the court case that the winds were gusting above the crane's design speed. The anemometers measuring it were in the wind shadow of the stadium. The piece being picked was slightly heavier than calculated. More louvers had been fixed on it, increasing wind drag. On the day those were the errors that killed three men.

But what other things led to a culture on site where these errors could happen? It came out court that the client had created a muddled procurement route for the roof, muddying issues at bid and creating conflict throughout the design stages. The design team had agreed reluctantly to a very challenging delivery programme and then struggled to get complete information issued. The sub-contractor switched its construction approach to a radical new way late in the day. Disputes occurred about whether the design requirements were being followed.

Stories typical of many projects and spread over several years, but do they contribute to a job-culture that can influence key construction decisions? And meanwhile the 'drop dead' date of the first game of the season got ever closer as the programme started slipping behind, and evidently key individuals were introduced on site with the aim of whipping everyone to go faster.

The London 2012 Games had an exemplary health and safety record. Note also that there was never a panic in the press about it being delivered late. No doubt things dropped behind schedule sometimes, but realistic plans must have been put in place to pull that time back. Evidently a culture where corners were cut never developed.

So, as designers what can we do to reduce risks, particularly when projects face tough deadlines?

All the way through the job we must engage with and support all the project-wide safety initiatives . We must be an active part of the safety-culture that the project develops.
We need to agree to realistic delivery programmes and then deliver fully to them . If we hand over late or incomplete information, we are putting those further down the line under extra time pressure, which increases the possibility of error.
We need to have the courage to be the whistle-blower. A disregard on site for quality and design issues can be symptomatic of a culture that also shortcuts on safety. As individuals we sometimes need to step forward and point out the thing that everyone else doesn't want to see.
Finally, be aware that looming deadlines and delays put pressure on the whole supply chain , which in turn increases the chance of error. Be extra sensitive and do everything you can to relieve that pressure.

At the stadium in Milwaukee a statue commemorates Jerome Starr, Jeffrey Wischer and William DeGraves. Immortalised but gone. Sadly, I don't know the names of those who died at São Paulo. The news’ focus remains on the immovable first game.

1985: A summer digitally transformed

Mon, 29 Jun 2020 15:26:31 GMT

How a summer of coding and CAD set my career's themes for the next thirty-five years.

The picture above was taken five years ago. I’m standing 30m below ground in Soho, London, at Crossrail's Tottenham Court Road station. Since the east side of Dean Street had been taken away, visible behind and above me are two old haunts, one celebrating a 35th anniversary this week, the other a 30th.

In June 1985, between my third and fourth years at university, I spent ten weeks in 2 Dean Street working for Arup Associates. Only in retrospect can I now see that I had walked into the cutting edge of changes to the construction industry that continue today. Inadvertently I was setting the recurring themes for the rest of my career.

Arup Associates had been one of three design teams taken to New York by the developer Stuart Lipton. There he showed them how composite construction and curtain walling were delivering office space better, faster and cheaper, and he wanted to do that in London. First at Finsbury Avenue and then at Broadgate, Arup Associates were the first of those design teams off the block.

So, what made these projects so successful, setting the themes for UK construction in the years to come? If you think that BIM and MMC are ‘new’ or ‘innovative’ you may be surprised by how ‘current’ this list is: Digital Transformation, Multidisciplinary Collaboration and Engineering Innovation.

Digital Transformation: In June 1985 Arup Associates were about six months in to the first large scale use of CAD on a UK construction project. Whilst the Broadgate team still had drawing boards on their desks, they also had about six GDS workstations. Amusingly in retrospect they were on trolleys that you could wheel up next to your desk so you could spin your chair round and draw. This was mobile technology at its worst, and if you weren't careful whilst walking down the corridor you could snag the leads and wipe out hours of someone’s work.

However, these terminals had been fully embraced and allowed a remarkably small team to crank out a remarkable number of superbly coordinated drawings. They had become central to the multidisciplinary team. A year later, when I joined full time, all teams had re-planned the office so that workstations were in a fixed area with layout space for drawings around them. I went on the CAD course two weeks after re-joining and over the next four years became expert at driving the tablets and pucks (this was pre-mouse).

Multidisciplinary Collaboration: Right from its inception in 1964 Arup Associates were multidisciplinary. Architects, engineers and quantity surveyors were all in-house, and all design decisions were taken collaboratively. The introduction of CAD moved the design debate from being around sets of paper drawings to being on-screen, with 2D data of architecture, structure and services superimposed – conventional now, radical then. All architects and engineers had drawn on drawing boards, and that tradition continued with the CAD system. Everyone was a content producer – when did the frustrating split of the structural engineer from the production of drawings occur?

Engineering Innovation: It wasn't called MMC then, but the whole of the Broadgate development had constructability at its heart. The composite steel frame, the crinkly tin floors and the huge curtain wall panels were all at the centre of the design process and their subcontractor teams were in the office from day one. Buildings had no steps in their floor plates to enable materials to be more easily moved around.

I was asked to do the calculations for some composite beams. By hand these are long, procedural calculations taking about five hours each and it was very easy to make an error. I spotted an unused Apricot computer in the corner and asked if I could use my BASIC coding skills, learned during my University 3rd year project. After two weeks I could reliably calculate a beam in less than ten minutes, and the first version of COMPOS was born. A year later it was all over Arup.

I remember leaving the office late one evening that summer and walking home across South London, feeling the glow of satisfaction of having worked with the team to agree the design direction for movement joint in Phase 2’s glazed atrium. And on that walk, I decided I wouldn't stay on at University and do a geotechnics PhD, and I’d run off instead to play with architects.

Thirty-five years later these three themes remain at the centre of my professional life. Sure, the technology has improved, and many new acronyms have been coined, but the ‘social’ people-based issues of getting teams to work together remain the same. And I still get a buzz when we get it right!

"And what about the 30th Anniversary" I hear you shout! Circled on the right of the photo heading this blog is the floor of the Bath House pub, no doubt demolished in line with Crossrail’s drugs and alcohol policy. In June 1990 it was the site of my stag night – but some stories are best not blogged about.

The four 'i's of design for product-based infrastructure

Thu, 18 Jun 2020 16:14:26 GMT

Will a product-based future mean there is going to be less design?

Modern Methods of Construction. Building Offsite. DfMA. Call it what you want, but the shift from onsite activies to using more preassembled components has been making some real progress over the last five years. The journey has started.

A few years ago, I described this vision to students at Surrey University and was asked a question that I didn’t answer very well at the time. ‘Will this product-based future mean there is going to be less design?’ It got me thinking, but for some reason I never wrote down my conclusion. Until now!

I think the answer is no; but the design done is going to have to be different.

At the moment clients, consultants and contractors, architects, QSs and engineers are all playing across all stages in the process – specification, design, manufacture and installation. Once a coherent modular future is mapped out these designers are going to have to stop experimenting with new prototypes for every project, repeating low grade, non-optimised tasks. Over the past decade I have come to the conclusion that much of our design effort is unfocused and doesn't deliver the value end users are looking for. Skills are short, and we can't afford that wastage to continue. Just deploy those previously optimised modules!

So, what design activities will they be doing in this future?

Product based design will focus on four 'i's: Integration, Interfaces, Improvement and Innovation, and each of these areas may become new distinct specialist areas.

The first two of these define how we deploy the products available on a project.

Integration: Which standard products are we going to bring together to fulfil requirements? How do they combine as a whole? What configurable settings are right for this project?

Interfaces: All sites will have some remaining bespoke or insitu aspect. This needs to become a key design focus, driving up overall quality, rather than being left up to a site team to sort out the gaps and surprises.

The second two 'i's relate to refinement of the products themselves .

Improvement: Capturing lessons learned and incrementally extending the range and capability of a product. Add a new and better pump type to an assembly. Turn an insitu stitch into a mechanical fixing. And finally....

Innovation: Make the big jump to create a whole new product. Start with literature and IP searches, carry out fundamental R&D and ensure what is created is fully documented and ready - technologically, commercially, for manufacture and management.

In current modular design those ‘i’s happen, but they are often all mixed up together. They will become more distinct, more focused activities. There is still plenty of design, but activities are now intrinsically linked to the processes and stages of manufacture, assembly and operation.

This new set of activities is going to present challenges to the current breed of design consultancies. These new specialisms don’t really fit into the teams they sell currently. Architects intrinsically think about projects end to end and are going to struggle not to tweak the modules because their project is ‘special’ (all projects are special in the eyes of a conscientious architect). In this MMC future there is a cardinal rule; don’t tweak the manufacturing!

Meanwhile, Improvement and Innovation are natural homes for specialists from other manufacturing sectors; the mechanical, robotic, material and other engineers. Some people with experience of existing infrastructure will be needed to develop the brief – but probably not that many. Interfaces will be a natural home for landscape architects and civil engineers. Those activities will remain recognisable, at least for a while.

Many things need to change to drive down cost, carbon and time and increase safety and reliability, all whilst driving up the quality expected from our infrastructure. Design and designers will be a key to enabling this future.

There will still be lots of design. Perhaps more. It will just be different and more focused.

Covid-19: Must we change everything?

jtrideas@outlook.com (John Roberts) — Fri, 12 Jun 2020 10:51:12 GMT

How much of our physical infrastructure needs a long-term redesign in response to Covid-19? Quite probably the answer will be ‘not that much’, but there are other related changes we will need or can choose to make.

LinkedIn has been full of posts about the short-term measures needed to get offices, shops and sites open again. Architects and engineers have been speculating on how social distancing will require restaurants, transport and hotels to be reorganised.

June’s New Civil Engineer had a diverse range of thoughts; speculation on the long-term impacts on aviation; HS2 debating whether trains and stations will need to be redesigned; Paul Sheffield reflecting on the balance of economic growth and carbon reductions and ‘how we can build a better new normal’.

Another magazine in my life is New Scientist and, interestingly, there is still confusion about how Covid-19 actually works. However, one recent article made clear to me a likely outcome for this pandemic is that the virus will change over time to join four other ex-deadly coronaviruses that now cause 20-30% of colds.

Rapid viral evolution lies behind a pandemic. High population densities of animals and people living close together give the ideal conditions for this to occur. A place like the Huanan wet market had these conditions and studies show several intermediate viral variants had been circulating, finally allowing a deadly version to get established.

“The key here is that there is generally a trade-off between how lethal a virus is and how successfully it can spread. A pathogen that kills each host before it has time to infect other susceptible individuals will rapidly die out.” Where hosts are crowded together this doesn’t matter, but once a virus spreads to the wider population, natural selection will tend to favour strains that are less deadly. “Put bluntly, dead hosts don’t travel, and so don’t spread the virus to new susceptible hosts.”

As a result of this we have all probably had the 1889 Russian flu bug a few times. It is now just a cold, but as far as viral evolution is concerned, that is success. It is still alive and widespread! Covid-19 should eventually degrade in the same way, and New Scientist reports on some evidence that death rates are reducing already (although comparison of figures from around the world is tricky).

So, whilst I’m still concerned about when it is going to be safe to visit my 96-year-old Mum’s care home, do we really need to start redesigning our physical infrastructure in response? I can remember two other ‘we must change everything’ crises.

Heathrow Mortar Attacks 1994: In the wake of this and other bombings it was suggested that buildings should be significantly hardened against this new terrorist threat. An excellent ICE paper (which I now can’t find) pointed out that the first Irish related London station bombing was in 1883, with more attacks in the following two years. Terrorism is not a new thing. Façade design for blasts become more sophisticated, but that is about the only long-term change introduced.
The 9/11 attacks 2001: Immediately after the attacks these papers discussing radical changes to tall buildings including more and hardened (i.e. concrete) cores. After discussion, measures have evolved to become a clarifying of US approaches to disproportionate collapse – something that was already in UK codes after Ronan Point. Security at airports has prevented any similar attacks.

If we wind ourselves forwards by ten years, I think there is very little of our physical infrastructure that will need to change (assuming that Covid-19 follows the normal evolution). The discussion then becomes how long ‘short-term’ measures will need to last.

So, what will need to change?

We need to have an off-the-shelf draft pandemic response ready to use for when the next one comes along – because it will come eventually. It also needs to be kept maintained over the years – unlike Tsunami warning systems that fall apart because they aren’t used until they are suddenly needed.
All the systems engineering and digital twin thinking now happening at places like the Centre for Digital Built Britain needs to rapidly developed. Our crisis response could have been so much better if this had been already in place.
We need to start preparations for other low-probability, high impact events. What about solar flares? What about a widely successful cyber-attack?

Finally, there will be the things we want to change about life, society, fairness and the environment. But that is a list for another day.

How do we stop Digital Transformation becoming Digital Disruption?

Fri, 05 Jun 2020 07:25:13 GMT

“We shape our tools and afterwards our tools shape us.”
Marshall McLuhan

An experiment in Digital Transformation has been going on for 40 years. Whilst many good things have come out of it, there have also some bad, and the downsides are the way it has changed people, skills and professional culture.

This experiment has been the introduction, and then continuous development, of structural analysis software. This started with simple stick models at universities and innovative companies. These became linked to spreadsheets, then moved into Finite Element Analysis of solids. Then checking code compliance and connection design emerged followed by links into our drawing tools. Now the future is increasingly parametric with artificial intelligence on the way.

I’ve been able to watch all that happen over the past 35 years, and we have all rightly embraced each of these miracles. But each development has also shifted the balance of skills in teams and subsequent generations structural engineers, and many think not all these changes are for the best.

Are we storing up problems going forward?

At university I was taught two approaches to structural design:

Quantitative ; which works out exactly where the forces are and their values, and
Qualitative ; which is used to gain ‘a feel for the behaviour’ of a structure

Later I saw this split expressed as:

Quantitative design takes an existing geometry and focuses on defining the force path in detail through that geometry.
Meanwhile qualitative design allows the engineer to place the forces where they want them.

I’ve always loved that idea of placing the forces and the element of choice it brings. You are the one in charge of the design, whilst with a qualitative approach you are the victim. You get what you get. The qualitative teaching at Southampton University, based on the work of David Brohn, had the greatest influence on my career of any course I ever took. It gave me the ability to quickly think about structural options, mentally play ‘what if?’ and know how to morph the scheme towards a better solution.

Let me tell you a story from right back when I started working as a structural engineer

The first moment I had my eyes opened to this idea of ‘placing forces’ was a few months after I joined Arup Associates. I was working on Stockley Park for Charlie Wymer. He was a fantastic person to have as your first project engineer, spending much of the time with his feet up on the desk, smoking roll ups and thinking great thoughts.

He was designing the vaulted roof of the sports hall on an A4 sheet. The arch was pushing the supporting wall outwards and the resultant bending increased the column size, meaning it was wider than the wall. The resultant brick pier inside might injure people; on the outside it would be ugly from the approach road.

So, Charlie added a short cantilever at the top of the column and landed the roof beam on that. That moved the reaction and creating an opposite flex in the column, halving the moments and, magically, the column fitted inside the wall without a pier. This change also led to a better way of accommodating the gutter and a new lighting arrangement in the hall. Win. Win. Win.

In a way this is a trivial example (1) , and since then I have seen and been the cause of many more dramatic adjustments to structures that move, reduce or express the forces. But for me this example was the lightbulb moment when I realised all that qualitative ‘feely’ stuff could put me in charge of a structure, and that has been the basis of much of my subsequent career.

I fear digital transformation has reduced the likelihood that changes like this would happen. An engineer would refine the answer to the first scheme presented rather than wondering what changing the question would bring. The final product would suffer as a result.

The rise of Quantitative over Qualitative skills

Computers are good at doing calculations and hence are fantastic tools for quantitative analysis. They are naturally precise and good at answering ‘closed’ questions. Software development has focused on detailed design, which is where most of the design hours are expended and where they clearly can save time.

But computers are currently not so good at intangibles like gaining ‘a feel for the behaviour’. The increasing reliance on software has encouraged these qualitative and quantitative approaches to split into two separate groups of thinkers, rather than being blended within each one of us: Designers and analysts.

Back in the 80s and 90s hardware and software was more rudimentary, meaning you needed to build all aspects of analysis models up from scratch (2) and therefore you had your hands all over the assumptions of how your engineering was going to work. Qualitative and quantitative remained naturally intertwined.

Over subsequent years more and more assumptions have been built into the tools. Code based analysis of members and connections have become integrated. Yes, I think this is a great step forward, and yes, there are still ways to climb into the model and vary these underlying assumptions, but too often engineers just accept the defaults. Many say it is due to time pressure caused by reduced fees, but it is increasingly a result of shifting skills and team cultures.

It is not just new recruits that are being influenced by the software tools we are using. In some sectors major projects have design period that can last for a decade. As a result, engineers aren’t seeing the early, fluid stages of design very often in their careers. The focus has become building sophisticated models for final assurance, sometimes at an inappropriately early stage.

What can the wider construction industry learn from this experiment in Digital Transformation?

As the pace of digital transformation accelerates, we need to remember that people are always a key part of any system we create. We forget this because, psychologically, engineers are often more comfortable with things, systems and processes, and less happy dealing with the soft, squishy people issues we encounter. There is a danger that we end up seeing people as a problem, getting in the way of digital transformation.

Yes, but also no. I’m going to borrow a slogan from Laing O’Rourke’s ‘Next Gear’ safety campaigns. ‘People are the solution’.

If engineers can train with use tools that allow them to play qualitatively with their designs and use the right level of model granularity at the right project stage, software will be an increasingly wonderful thing. Can there be a qualitative ‘front end’ that allows mental exploration before the jump into detail that requires change to stop? University training (3) and software providers need to step up to the challenge.

Then the culture of design teams needs to nurture and reward these qualitative skills. It is encouraging to find companies like Robert Bird Group working with David Brohn to develop and maintain the awareness, skills and culture needed for people to remain in charge. This cultural change will require constant nurturing but is vital.

Digital transformation will be fantastic if people can see inside the black boxes we use, and if these tools give understandable feedback allowing engineers to remain in charge of the outputs. If we get it wrong, we could be in for some unplanned and unpleasant surprises – and artificial intelligence will compound this mess rather than refining and improving as is hoped.

We must always remember that digital transformation involves people and our tools, process and culture must allow them to remain in charge. Where do we want to go? What do we want to do? How are our tools going to help us?

People-centric transformation please, not disruption.

1. Not only is a hammer beam a trivial example, it is one Charlie borrowed from centuries of cathedral builders
2. Fun fact: I wrote the code for Arup’s first composite beam analysis software as part of my summer job in 1985. 35 years ago!! AAAAAGGHHH!!!!! There will be a blog post in July.
3. I am aware that several university structural engineering departments have been butting their heads against this for a while. It doesn’t feel yet like we are winning the battle.

Has the model killed-off drawing standards?

Fri, 29 May 2020 06:52:02 GMT

Does the graphical standard of our 2D construction drawings still matter in these days of models and digital twins? I think it does.

A lockdown tidy-up led me from the letters page of New Civil Engineer to the The Engineers Collective podcast episode with Ed McCann talking about Future Skills. Ed discussed his concerns around the decline of construction drawing quality and the dangers this poses. I agree, and I also think it shows up some of the inefficiencies in the construction industry.

An alternative L.A. story

It set me thinking about a formative moment in my career. In 1997 I arrived in Arup’s Los Angeles office after seven years working on many exciting and ground-breaking scheme designs, mainly with Foster and Partners. My conceptual engineering was top-notch, but perhaps the ‘detail muscles’ I initially built up as a graduate had become a little flabby.

That office had the best drafting team I think I have ever worked with. Multidisciplinary design of hospitals was the daily bread and butter and seven draughters, choreographed by their intimidating (at first) leader, cranked-out drawings with a drilled rigour.

One of my first projects was to sort out the suspended roof bowl of Ben Gurion airport where the original layouts were not great; refining weird steelwork has always been a speciality of mine. I spent a happy morning marking-up the drawing, with various ideas coming and then being rejected, each leaving their mark in red ink spattered all over the sheet alongside the final changes. At lunchtime I dropped it onto the corner of the draughter’s desk.

About 30 minutes later the draughting leader put the mark-up back on my desk and told me “we’re not doing that”. I think the last time I’d been told my work wasn’t good enough I had been 15, and the 20-year gap made the surprise all the greater. But it brought me to the realisation that one reason why they were such a high-performance team was they were being fed with good quality information from the rest of the office. If there was enough time, they quite enjoyed working things out from scant details, but most days they had a pile of mark-ups ahead of them and everything needed to be crystal clear.

My next three years in Los Angeles were dominated by the Miller Park baseball stadium roof – 13000 tons of curving, complex steel, setting-out and weld symbols. I lived and learned the language of the effective mark-up. Compared to UK practice I became impressed by how American engineers followed graphical conventions. Standard notes and symbols were universally maintained and understood. Invention of new versions that added nothing to the finished product was eliminated, allowing effort to focus on the things that mattered – the actual engineering content.

When I left the US for the UK after three years, I was told I’d become the clearest marker-upper (is that a word?) in the office, moving from the ridiculous towards the sublime. Coming from that intimidating man that statement was a badge of honour, and I took those standardised methods and evangelised them through two teams in the UK and another in India.

The sniff test

So, one reason that standardised 2D-output is important is the increased productivity it enables in the teams that follow and rely on the information. However, I think it is also an effective indicator of wider engineering quality, by being a part of ‘the sniff test’ for reviewers. A badly presented set of drawings will often indicate a problem with the culture of the team that produced it, and as a result the likelihood of finding technical problems increases. Things ‘smell wrong’. Additionally, it means the job of finding a technical issue is going to be a longer chore as you spend time trying to understand what the drawings actually mean and how they link up. It’s not great fun and not effective use of time.

Conversely, reviewing a great looking, well-coordinated set of drawings can be a pleasure. It allows quicker and clearer understanding and the conversations with the team rapidly move to higher value discussions of underlying decisions made in getting to that solution. You can’t rely on good looking drawings always being correct – but there definitely is an intangible link. And that hasn’t changed just because our drawings are now cut from a 3D model. 2D-output remains a key part of the way we conceive, coordinate and construct buildings. Poorly chosen and annotated sections and views can indicate a design team lost in their own modelling processes and not paying enough attention to wider technical and communication issues.

Moving toward a multi-D future

Whilst the future of 2D information is perhaps uncertain, its much-predicted demise is yet to happen - and for very good reasons. A drawing is an abstraction of a 3D object chosen by the author and annotated to represent exactly what they mean to convey. It should be crystal clear on its message. A set of drawings is often the best record of a design stage and are an instruction to the next people in the information chain.

Strangely a drawing is often more tangible than a 3D model – even if not actually printed. If you have every had to do a deep technical review and mark up on a model you will know the difficulty of tracking elusive millimetres of tolerance. When you sign your name on the corner of a drawing you really know what you just signed. It is akin to lawyers still needing ‘wet signatures’ on some contracts. How can we develop the ability to ‘smell’ technical problems in a model?

Whilst these may only be short-term issues, re-establishing lost rigour in the way our information outputs adhere to standards will not be wasted effort. Increasingly it is inherent in our role as designer or contractor that we are data handlers. It is our job to provide the right data in the right format, as the next person in the data chain relies on that to be effective. It improves efficiency. It improves assurance.

An emphasis on the data standards of our deliverables in an increasingly multi-D future is going to be vital, and we should not forget it in 2D just yet.

Mastering our tools

Fri, 22 Apr 2016 23:00:00 GMT

“A structural analyst is someone who works out what the forces are. A structural engineer is someone who chooses where they go.”

A computer only turned up on my desk in 1997. For my career's previous 11 years most calculations were done with no analysis aid other than a calculator. As a result, you constantly had to make choices. What checks were important? Shall we assume it is one-way spanning (much easier)? Where exactly is this beam bearing?

And most of my early years were spent designing steel frames. A kit of parts fabricated off site and assembled bit by bit in (mainly) simply supported spans. The concrete on metal decking was assumed to span simply as well. All easily understood and separately calculable. The engineer was in charge. But slowly we have been given more and more analytical power, and we can build vast and complicated models with everything in them, that do all we ever dreamed of. And often everything is connected to everything else, and, not surprisingly forces, go everywhere in ways we don't understand - but we feel we need to reinforce for them. And perhaps for insitu reinforced concrete that's not far from the truth.

Has all this analytical power reduced us to mere analysts?

I've been reminded recently, several times, that it is important that we remember how things are put together. A simple example: A precast walkway spans between two precast beams and has a precast 'twinwall' panel running beneath its third edge - the wall of a tank. All elements will be joined together by an insitu stitch, so why not model it as a continuous concrete structure? It is supported on three edges surely! Why not save that bit of rebar?

But the reality and economics of Design for Manufacture and Assembly means that the site team need to be able to land the precast walkway quickly and reliably. The beams provide easy bearing points, but the face panel of the twinwall is narrow and not necessarily at the same level as the beams. So, for ease of construction the right answer is to design the walkway as simply supported between the beams, using the stitch to the wall only to help stiffen the wall panel horizontally in the final state. If you were calculating by hand, I think you'd do this naturally, thinking about how the elements go together. Instead we got a 'wished in place' continuous analysis, and the first walkways on site were a pain to erect (we sorted out the later ones).

For small items, poured or milled as a single piece, a continuous finite element model may be the truth (or close to the truth). However, our buildings and infrastructure are all of a scale where they take time to build, have intermediate stages of stress, shrink, expand, and are increasingly made up of assemblies of offsite manufactured components.

Before you next press 'run' please take the time to consider whether your output is going to properly represent the way the structure will be put together. Mere analysts will be squeezed out of the jobs market by the rise of the robots. However, all the predictions are that we won't have enough engineers!

Time to make sure you're one of the ones making the decisions!

Embrace your digital deliverables - or go bust!

Wed, 11 Nov 2015 00:00:00 GMT

On 5 November my wife and I came to the same realisation about the challenges of the digital future.

I was at Bentley's "Year In Infrastructure 2015" conference. She was trying to get the SatNav fixed on our car. Her story first.

Over the years we have owned six Toyotas. They've been fantastically reliable, we like them, and I've enjoyed the mythology surrounding 'The Toyota Way', Kanban, etc.. The digital modelling used to design and deliver the cars is legendary.

The reality you can face at a service station can be somewhat different. Their cars' weakest aspect has been the built-in SatNav. Called 'Touch and Go’ the last three have all been completely different, with no shared family resemblance - and they seem to be getting less user-friendly. The latest incarnation started freezing a few months ago, just before a service, but when we pointed out the problem, we were told we needed to give the garage more notice and they couldn't look at it. It felt as if they were ducking the problem.

The problem has since got markedly worse, so before this service we gave plenty of notice. At first the garage said no action was needed. Then they reset the unit at our insistence, and finally, reluctantly, accepted that there was a problem……… but they would need to do some research on the internet to find a solution. They want us to bring it back another time, with the 20-mile round trip that entails.

And their proposed solution is not to reload the software - it is to change the unit. However, to us the key problem now seems obvious: we are dealing with a garage that is full of mechanics. They have happily taken our money to do the mechanical servicing and evidently hope we will be happy that the engine and wheels are running smoothly as we have in the past.

But the customer has changed! We take the fact that the car 'runs' for granted - that is why I buy a Toyota! Increasingly the key differentiator for a car is the way it integrates with our digital lives and the SatNav is at the centre of that. A bunch of mechanics don't want to move out of their comfort zone and engage with IT software - and they don't seem to understand why their customer now sees this as a big, big problem! Their answer to a software problem is an expensive mechanical one - take out the problem component and replace it with a new one!

Which brings me neatly back to the construction industry.

The same transformation is happening - where the digital asset the customer receives is becoming as important as the actual physical asset. And from some tweets from designers at the Bentley conference I'm not sure if the design community have yet understood what their customers are starting to demand.

In construction the 'BIM thing' began when software first allowed designers to produce 2D drawings more quickly by using a 3D model. The accuracy of the model was only of interest to those designers. Then the contractors wanted to link the model to programme and pricing data. That is now becoming a requirement. At Laing O'Rourke our offsite manufacturing requires aspects of the model to be delivered in specific ways. Accurately delivering that digital asset is a key differentiator when we chose which design partners to work with. We monitor the performance of our consultants.

And increasingly our clients are expecting legacy data from us that is accurate and in the format they need to operate their infrastructure into the future. The virtual asset is becoming as important to them as the physical one we have designed, manufactured and constructed. It's no longer good enough to deliver a roll of dodgy 'as-built' drawings two years after handover. Infrastructure clients now need accurate models delivered in advance of opening to enable 'soft landings' for their operations and maintenance teams.

If Toyota don't step up to their digital responsibilities and sort out my SatNav they may be losing a repeat customer, and I'll be looking forward to Google or Apple entering the car market (as is often rumoured). Similarly, if teams in the construction industry don't realise that they now need to produce accurate digital assets in parallel to the physical ones they will find they lose clients to those that do. It doesn't matter how good the design looks on paper, or how well built the final project is. If the customer doesn't get the data they asked for they won't shop with you again.

The game has changed. And as we know, the customer is always right.

BIM, BoM & Parallels with Formula 1

Mon, 17 Aug 2015 23:00:00 GMT

What can BIM learn from Formula 1? A surprising amount it turns out.

As part of our series of ‘Excellence in Engineering’ webinars EnExG welcomed Matt Burke and Iain Bomphray from Williams Advanced Engineering. We had previously shown them round our Explore factory and have been discussing ways their expertise in lightweight structures, energy storage and energy recovery might apply to the construction sector. We had also chatted about the way BIM is being applied in the construction sector. As part of a wide-ranging presentation Iain talked in some detail about the way Digital Engineering is central to the design and support of their cars, and evidently the issues they are addressing are close to the Construction’s BIM agenda.

Central to all Williams’ operations is “the BoM” – the Bill of Materials. This is a model with embedded and attached databases that tracks the huge number of components needed in an F1 car, right down to individual screws. In BIM terms this is their Federated Model – the virtual mirror of ‘real reality’. The BoM is the way Williams tracks the many developing components all the way from an idea through to being on a car. It is closely linked to their process for design, manufacturing, and testing. In a similar way a BIM model would have objects with developing Levels of Detail (LoD) and status tracked against a Plan of Work (PoW).

Williams evidently have great discipline in following all the processes wrapped around the BoM. Iain told a great story where two copies of a new component were made. One was immediately shipped to Spain and put on the car. Meanwhile the other was put on the test rig at HQ and taken through its paces. The test completed successfully; the lab technician signed it off within the BoM followed by the head of the lab. The workflow switches instantly to Spain where the car is already fuelled up, and the chief mechanic clicked the final box to release it onto the track. Rapid prototyping in action, revolving around digital workflows.

A coming challenge for BIM is Asset Information Management (AIM). F1 is already dealing with this. Apart from knowing its design and manufacturing status every component recorded in the BoM knows if it is in a store in HQ, deployed to the track, or already on the car. Some components such as tyres only last part of a race whilst a chassis may compete in several. Each item in the BoM needs to know its allowable lifespan and how far through that it is, so it can flag up when a replacement is needed. Maintenance manuals for every component are of course linked to each object. I think the construction industry is some way away from achieving the asset integration F1 already has!

There is a key difference between construction and F1 that I hadn't previously thought of. Each part of the car can simultaneously exist in several different versions. The example given was that the nose cones and front spoilers are different for every race, evolving and adjusting the required trim of the car. Several may get taken to each race for test laps before the final one is chosen. At each race the car is unique! I feel grateful that we at least only have to deal with one version of reality in BIM once the design moves towards construction.

I believe the key to BIM is going to be a cultural one – once all the people involved are prepared to engage with the model and respect proper data protocols we will have it cracked. I asked whether Williams have to continually work on culture and training and is everyone happy to engage in this parallel digital world? Much to my relief Iain also sees this as a key issue that needs continuous work. Evidently the BoM is immensely successful, but I was relieved when he did admit that behaviours are ‘sometimes a bit messy’.

Phew. I get intimidated by perfection. Thanks Matt and Iain for a great talk!

People, teams, language and the pursuit of excellence

Mon, 06 Jul 2015 23:00:00 GMT

Will recruiting the people our industry needs for the future be frustrated by the words we use now? Do we need to change the way we talk about the vision for our teams?

“We want the best graduates from the best universities.”: I have been at several presentations recently, by several companies, where this or similar statements have been made. And at face value, why wouldn't we? But I’ve come to the conclusion that this is a testosterone driven statement, not fully thought through, that contributes to preserving an unhappy status quo. It assumes we know what excellent looks like in the future, and that this future will be best served by a monoculture of whatever elite universities thought were the brightest and the best four years ago.

And then we get frustrated that we can't find enough of these ‘above average’ recruits. There is a reason for this of course. On average most people are…….. average. It's the way the maths works. Chasing and then recruiting an ‘elite’ monoculture will be a major barrier to achieving the diversity we need and ignores most of the workforce we have available. The future will require balanced teams with a range of skills and temperament to face future needs that we don't even know about yet. We need some people who can do the same stuff everyday and do it right every time. We need others who can overcome unique challenges that come up only occasionally.

So, we need to recruit with this broader future team structure in mind. A decade ago, I joked (actually only half-joked) that I wanted the best graduates from the second-best universities. They seemed to have the patience to build their engineering skills into careers and didn't want to flip into project management after two years - before they even understood what needed to be managed. I'm pleased to see that industry recently has started to develop a wider focus on apprentices, cadets and returning part-time parents (amongst others) as they all contribute to deepening the skills and approaches our teams will have.

However, it is important to realise that these moves should not be seen as answering the problems of a skill shortage – a way of making do because we can never get enough of the ‘best’. That is not the problem we should be solving. The vision that these initiatives help achieve is of teams with diverse focus and background, that better represent society and that will also be resilient with whatever surprises the future will throw at us.

We should stop seeking to build teams based on only some current opinion of ‘the best’. Are the candidates we assess robust future team players? Our organisations should give a diverse range of good people good careers and have we should have the systems and development in place that allow those teams to achieve great results. These careers will not be a linear process, a never-ending race to wherever is perceived as the top. Instead they need to be supported, planned, evolving paths over the 40 years or so that most of us will work for. They will vary in intensity and focus depending on the opportunities, new skills, partners, children and locations that happened over the arc of a career.

And perhaps once we start to talk about teams with diverse backgrounds, characters and career paths we will find the diversity metrics of sex, race, religion and orientation that society needs to police will become naturally easier to achieve.

Getting ready for BIM Level 2 - how difficult can it be?

Mon, 17 Mar 2014 00:00:00 GMT

Last week I talked about the five vital behaviours needed for BIM Level 1. Teams that adopt these ways of working will have taken the first big step towards being ready for BIM Level 2 when the specifications for this are published at the end of 2014. Of the five behaviours some are, of course, more difficult than others. Here is my view of the level of challenge each of them poses. Two are 'easy wins', two are 'more work needed' and one is 'BIM's big problem'.

1. Teams that create and follow BIM Execution Plans (BEPs) together: More work needed

Many projects already have BEPs. However often Project Managers see these as only being of concern to the CAD team and do not engage. I am really looking forward to rolling out our training for PMs to help them understand the issues around the key documents that PAS1192-2 requires clients and teams to use. EIRs. BEPs. MIDPs. Plenty of new acronyms that a PM needs to understand, drive within their teams and assist clients with.

2. Using WIP, Shared, Published and Archived data storage areas in a Common Data Environment (CDE): Easy win

From the show of hands at our recent BIM champions meeting this has been quietly happening across our UK teams already. However, usually only the CAD team know about it, and I found one PM who didn't realise it was already embedded in his project! The concept of the CDE and the progression of data storage defined by PAS1192-2 needs to become the language of the team, and must be used for all data, not just drawings - reports and calculations for instance.

3. Correctly named data with a defined purpose and status: Easy win

Again our BIM champions have already implemented our standard naming conventions across most of our projects. However, as for the previous behaviour, we need to extend this across all our documents and make it the language of the team. We need to look at our standards to make sure everything is in place to allow them to apply this to everything!

4. Only properly checked data getting Shared and Published: More work needed

A team of us are working at updating the review procedures in our BMS (Business Management System) to bring advice right up to date with both BIM requirements and the Atkins Design Principles. Collaboration requires the sharing of data that everyone can trust it for the defined purpose so, as ever, review is extremely important. In particular the whole of our industry needs to better understand what checking a model entails!

5. Delivering the defined Level of Detail for Stages Zero to 7: BIM's big challenge

This is the area where the UK's construction industry needs to do most work. Each discipline needs a clear definition of what delivery to Level 2 means. When you working at Stage 3, say, exactly what should be in your model and what exactly can clients and other team members use that data for? Over delivery at the early stages of projects, both real and perceived, is a problem we are seeing already, especially in the MEP disciplines. For instance, ducts are now looking so realistic at scheme design, shown complete with flanges and hangers, that some contractors are believing they can construct straight from these drawings. The reality is that no one has 'designed' that information - they are just pictures.

I hear that defined levels of detail as part of a digital plan of work will be published in the UK at the end of 2014. We can't wait that long and are defining the contents and uses of our models stage by stage. If a client requires something extra, we can of course agree to do more, but that will be agreed in conversations based around a clear starting point - true collaborative working!

The vital behaviours for BIM Level 1

Mon, 10 Mar 2014 00:00:00 GMT

I've just finished reading a 'management' book! All the way through!

In the past I've found these tend to peter out after the first third, once the authors have set out their big idea, but I kept with this one to the end. It was "Influencer: The Power to Change Anything" and I think Anne Kemp has forgotten I borrowed it about 9 months ago. But it became my Christmas reading because I have just been asked to 'Sponsor' the BIM Level 1 roll-out in Atkins’ Design and Engineering team here in the UK.

So how can I influence a thousand of you to 'live' BIM Level 1? I think just telling you to read our new Information Management standard and PAS 1192-2 is not going to persuade you - great though they are! The book tells us we should focus on 'vital behaviours' - behaviours that create a cascade of change. What would we see if we were all, every one of us, doing BIM Level 1 as business as usual every day? How would we be managing ALL our information?

The book tells us we should focus on 'vital behaviours' - behaviours that create a cascade of change. What would we see if we were all, every one of us, doing BIM Level 1 as business as usual every day? How would we be managing ALL our information?

It would look like this........

Teams that create and follow BIM Execution Plans (BEPs) together.
Using WIP, Shared, Published and Archived data storage areas in a Common Data Environment (CDE).
Correctly named data with a defined purpose and status.
Only properly checked data getting Shared and Published.
Delivering the defined Level of Detail for Stages Zero to 7.

Deceptively simple - and not a 3D model in sight. But what we need is for ALL of us to do this ALL the of time. Not just models and drawings! Reports, calculations - everything. Once we behave this way we can collaborate in confidence. Until we consistently do these things anyone who thinks they are approaching Level 2 is just mucking around with Revit and kidding themselves. Many people get distracted by the rising line on the BIM maturity 'wedge' diagram. That's where the new technology is, new machines that go ping - and we all like shopping.

The key step is Level 0 to 1. That is about personal and organisational change. Not doing things. Sharing. Doing the same thing every time. Trusting. All these are less comfortable things to talk about than what software you want to buy for BIM. And they don't sound much fun. But if you don't fully implement Level 1 any new technology is just adding new complexity to the old information chaos. Who would want to collaborate with that?

You are going to hear me banging on (sorry, 'influencing' you) about these five headings constantly for the next few months.

You can have your book back now Anne!

A cloudy future - four liberating things I did in 2013

Mon, 06 Jan 2014 00:00:00 GMT

At New Year, as well as thinking about all the things we should be doing in the year ahead, we should also celebrate what we achieved in the year gone by. Alongside 'important stuff' like working on a nuclear job, running 10k and going to Santorini I made four big organisational step changes for the better:

silencing my email
filing in the cloud
piling in the cloud
getting unlimited broadband at home

Silencing my email

I blogged about doing this last year and it works! In my efforts to make sure that I was in charge of my inbox, not vice versa, I turned off all dings and buzzes on my phone and Ipad when emails arrive. I now plan to go to my inbox three times a day - and when I do I don't read, I 'process'.

In particular I make sure everything is read and planned in the evening so I don't need to look in the morning and can drive my own agenda. It's the best time to actually do the work I need to do and my inbox should not be my 'To Do' list.

To be honest, this is still a work in progress, but it is so much better than last year! It was very difficult to keep on top when I was on site and off network.

Filing in the cloud

Whilst 'on site and off network' I needed to edit and send someone a copy of my CV, but it wasn't on my iPad. It took half an hour of calls from a car park to get one emailed to me; no one was picking up the phone! Aaaagh! But this set me thinking. I had various copies of my CV scattered in various places on drives at work and at home. Many of them out of date and none accessible when I was on the move, and that was actually true for nearly everything digital in my life.

And since the storage of my (and my family's) data was so complicated, ensuring that it was all regularly backed up was really difficult. With the number of photos my wife has, I was one hard drive failure away from divorce. So, I've moved into the cloud and paid for 100Gb of space on Dropbox ($99 per year - some free space available). All our home computers now use it as their 'My Documents' and anything you put in there gets back up, mirrored up into the cloud. It is configured so each of us sees only our own stuff, unless you access the whole lot via the web browser.

I have done the same for 'work-related' stuff and have it as a drive on my work laptop. I need to point out that project data, commercial data and data about our people MUST only be put on our own servers. But I had a load of technical reference, useful spreadsheets, other stuff.... and those CVs. I now have them stored in one place and they get backed up, and best of all, I can get at them from all my devices. Fab! If you ask me for a CV you get a link to the cloud sent from my iPhone - from a car park if necessary!

Piling in the cloud

What do you do with all that 'interesting stuff'; that article from New Scientist, that PDF explaining a standard, those notes scribbled on a whiteboard, the receipt, guarantee and instructions from those lights you just bought. If you are like me they are probably tucked away in all sorts of piles and drawers, in places you have to remember - and then don't.

Again, I have moved into the cloud, but this time with Evernote (£35 annually for Premium but you can start with free. There are limits on how much you upload per month, not total storage). The key thing to realise is that you can search inside every document you put there - inside PDFs only for Premium users. I now have Evernote on my home laptop, work laptop, iPhone and iPad and they all access my data in the cloud. I email interesting emails to it along with their attachments. I can drag and drop Office documents and PDFs into it. I photograph papers, receipts and whiteboards with my phone and upload them to it (Evernote is really good at reading handwriting inside photos).

I started by treating Evernote like a drive and trying to organise it. Now I have realised it is my own personal Google and just shove everything into the 'pile' with a few relevant tags. Minimal effort and I can find stuff by searching wherever I go. It works. Best of all, those 'that might be useful' things you see, stick them in Evernote and forget about them. They are there if you need them.

Getting unlimited broadband at home

In parallel with the last two, this one is really important. My BT deal was limited to 40Gb and I was aware we were often close to the limit. Then my daughter discovered the new season of Supernatural online, and we rather expensively blew through that. However, when I asked it turned out that for £5 more per month I could go unlimited. That allowed me to go Pro with Dropbox - in the first month we used over 100Gb as things went into the cloud and we are regularly over 70Gb now.

Final thought

We happily spend money on hardware - PCs, laptops, monitors, hard drives, smart phones and tablets. As we move into the cloud, I think we need to give more thought to spending on the services we buy to store and access our data, and 2013 was the year when I started that move.

And as I said in the title - having everything available everywhere is very, very liberating. Have a cloudy 2104!

The vital art of drawing badly

My journey into Construction Engineering: Part 3 of 3

More diversity, pace…… and sustainability’s next frontier

Diversity of mindsets

Pace of Projects

Sustainability’s next frontier

Could Construction Engineering be for you?

My journey into Construction Engineering: Part 2 of 3

Clarity, connection and diversity ﻿

Clarity of solution

Connection to construction

Diversity of challenge

My journey into Construction Engineering: Part 1 of 3

A few personal definitions

Temporary Works

Construction Engineering

A climate imperative

Warming up to better data

Why don’t energy providers provide better data representation and feedback to their customers?

Gas

Electricity

Conclusions

Is scarcity the mother of carbon reinvention?

Will we only stop using concrete when someone forces our hand? Two gardening stories showing why we may need a crisis before construction digs out some genuinely new ideas.

The vital art of drawing badly

We must overcome the physical, technological and psychological barriers and sketch!

Physical barriers

Technological Barriers

Psychological barriers

One final thought

Stop making excuses. Just get on with it! ﻿

Lessons from my woodshed: We are all connected

Procurement, design and temporary works all disrupt progress on a very minor project.

The wrong side of complexity: The National Infrastructure Commission's Design Principles

"For the simplicity that lies this side of complexity, I would not give a fig, but for the simplicity that lies on the other side of complexity, I would give my life." F. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Supreme Court Justice

Errors on a terrible day

The importance of job culture for site safety

1985: A summer digitally transformed

How a summer of coding and CAD set my career's themes for the next thirty-five years.

The four 'i's of design for product-based infrastructure

Will a product-based future mean there is going to be less design?

Covid-19: Must we change everything?

How much of our physical infrastructure needs a long-term redesign in response to Covid-19? Quite probably the answer will be ‘not that much’, but there are other related changes we will need or can choose to make.

How do we stop Digital Transformation becoming Digital Disruption?

“We shape our tools and afterwards our tools shape us.” Marshall McLuhan

Has the model killed-off drawing standards?

Does the graphical standard of our 2D construction drawings still matter in these days of models and digital twins? I think it does.

Mastering our tools

Embrace your digital deliverables - or go bust!

BIM, BoM & Parallels with Formula 1

People, teams, language and the pursuit of excellence

Getting ready for BIM Level 2 - how difficult can it be?

The vital behaviours for BIM Level 1

A cloudy future - four liberating things I did in 2013

Clarity, connection and diversity

Stop making excuses. Just get on with it!

"For the simplicity that lies this side of complexity, I would not give a fig, but for the simplicity that lies on the other side of complexity, I would give my life."
F. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Supreme Court Justice

“We shape our tools and afterwards our tools shape us.”
Marshall McLuhan