Lead Designer's Handbook

The Lead Designer and Design Management

Dale Sinclair

• Éditeur: RIBA Publishing
• Année: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781000705249
• Édition: 1
• Sujet: Architecture
• Sous-sujet: Architecture General

Despite co-ordination being the principal focus of the Lead Designer's role, there is very little written about how to undertake these duties. What tools can the Lead Designer use to address the many complexities of developing a design as part of an iterative process? How can the Lead Designer redefine what they do using a digital world to provide profoundly different and new services? This book analyses at all of these questions, setting out how the Lead Designer can perform effectively and efficiently in the digital world, addressing clients' new whole life project requirements and new ways of constructing and assembling buildings.

Managing increasing numbers of specialists in the construction process requires experience to ensure that their contributions are properly managed and produced at the right time. This book considers this challenge. It will also consider how the Lead Designer can effectively lead and manage health and safety aspects and risks (the principal designer role in UK regulations).

PART B
Leading and directing the design team

Chapter 4: Managing the design process

Chapter 5: Eight essential design management tools

Chapter 6: Delivering design on time

Chapter 7: Designing to cost

Chapter 8: The increased complexity of information

Chapter 9: Connecting design and construction

Chapter 10: Reviewing design

CHAPTER 4
MANAGING THE DESIGN PROCESS

Introduction

With the project team assembled the lead designer and the design team are ready to begin a project. This chapter considers some of the high-level concepts that frame the lead designer role, including intuition and iteration, collaborating and coordinating, and interfaces and interdependencies. It examines how technological changes are driving innovation and increasing the complexity of these challenges, which are unique to the lead designer role. It explains why these concepts, and the design process, need more than project management processes.

Iteration is crucial to the design process, A core role for the lead designer is managing the iterations of the design as unpredictable comments from clients and stakeholders are absorbed and fed into the complexity of the design process. The iterative challenge eases as the design progresses and aspects are progressively 'locked down! but the lead designer needs to be aware that a great deal of design is undertaken using the intuitive skills and experience of the designers, Clients have raised the bar, expecting their design team to understand every issue impacting on their specific sector and the lead designer must therefore unpick the biases and assumptions underpinning heuristic processes and the resultant information: was the design produced using knowledge and experience? Have detailed analysis, calculation and current best practice been used?

Facilitating good design and coordination requires a positive relationship between design team members and with the client and construction teams. The architect might provide the design leadership on a project, but the engineering requirements that might influence the aesthetics need to be developed, coordinated and integrated into the design by the lead designer. This chapter looks at the characteristics of exemplary teamwork and when collaborative efforts should be brought to bear to drive forward coordination efforts.

As well as understanding how each design team member works, the lead designer needs to understand how the tasks of the design team come together. They must understand the interfaces between the different tasks of the design team and, more crucially, the design dependences, i.e. when one design team member needs to receive an output from another. Managing interfaces and interdependencies has become more complicated due to an increase in the number of topics influencing the design process, such as sustainability or modern methods of construction (see Chapter 9) and shifts in design responsibility (see Chapter 8).

Technological change points to a future where less intuition and greater set knowledge is used on projects to aid client decision-making, leading to automation of parts of the design process and in turn fewer iterations. Ideas are woven throughout this chapter on how the lead designer can adapt to knowledge-driven design processes, facilitated by rapidly changing digital tools, to transform the design process and the work of the design team.

Intuition and iteration

The iterative nature of the desing process

Many project tasks occur in a linear fashion: one task following another. However, one of the unique facets of design is that the detail cannot be undertaken in a repeatable, logical and linear fashion. A design must be iterated in response to many topics until it reaches the level of detail consistent with the end of a stage when it can be rigorously reviewed and signed-off to allow the next design stage to commence. These topics include the need to:

• find the right design solution
• balance the briefing requirements and constraints with the right design solution
• respond to client or stakeholder comments and reviews
• accommodate different solutions for different briefs or site constraints
• react to the many factors that influence the design process
• act in accordance with directions and decisions given by the client
• bring the design in line with the Cost Plan
• coordinate the design
• align Project Strategies
• replace assumptions with fact
• replace rules of thumb engineering contributions with more detailed engineering analysis
• acknowledge the dynamic of assembling the project team in different ways
• react to the nuances of different Procurement Strategys.

This list is not comprehensive; however, it underlines the depth of topics driving iterations on a project and the challenges that the lead designer faces. Although there are means of reducing the iterations of a design, such as seeking early client decisions or examining feedback and re-using successful design elements from previous projects, the variables on any project make it difficult to predict what will need to be iterated and when. For example, on some projects the ideas might flow early and be well received by the client, yet on the next project the right solution might require adjustments to suit the client – with stakeholder comments creating further complexities and iterations. Reacting in response to these changing dynamics is core to the lead designer role.

Iteration is the act of repeating a process with the aim of achieving a specific objective, Each repetition of the process is called an 'iteration,' and the results of one iteration become the starting point for the next.

Iterative design is a design methodology undertaken using a cyclic process of prototyping, testing, analysing and refining a product or process. Based on the results of the most recent iteration, changes and refinements are made. This process is intended to ultimately improve the quality and functionality of the final design.

Iteration is at its most dynamic during the Concept Design when the big picture may not yet be clear. Conversely, by stage 4 any iterations should be minor, relating to interfaces or discrete parts of the building – for example, the detailing of a services component in the façade or the detailing of a canopy.

The iterative nature of design is better understood in the product design industry. This industry acknowledges the need for different stages to manage the development of a design, from the initial idea towards something capable of mass production. More importantly, it acknowledges that within each stage a number of tasks will have to be repeated. Figures such as 4.1 and 4.2 are commonly seen in design management books for product design; less so for architecture.

Figure 4.1: Iterative design process – example 1

In manufacturing industries a prototype is refined in an iterative manner until it is ready to be put into mass production. This process is essential to discard ideas that do not work, in order to develop and integrate the aesthetics and engineering aspects, and is essential in preventing design or manufacturing errors that could have significant ramifications once a product has gone into mass production.

Figure 4.2: Iterative design process – example 2

Over the years various attempts have been made to improve the predictability and programming of the design process. Such initiatives, where task A leads to task B, to task C and so on, fail due to a lack of understanding of iteration in the design process. The lead designer needs to be alert to the need for iteration and to use the tools set out in the next chapter to manage the iterative process, avoiding pressure to produce detailed Design Programmes that are doomed to fail because of rapid changes in the design environment. Simply, iteration is core to a successful design process and the lead designer must create a Design Programme that acknowledges this.

Figure 4.3: Iteration on a project

The number of iterations is highest during stage 2, when comments from the client team and stakeholders influence the direction of the design and strategic coordination is underway. Fewer iterations are required during stage 3, as the design team finalise the coordination of the scheme and at stage 4 iterations should be restricted to minor ones at interfaces.

The dangers of intuitive design processes

Iteration is inevitable and essential. Conversely, intuitive design processes create design risks and can be the root cause of many iterations. Designing intuitively has always been core to the design process. While this is likely to remain the case for some time, the lead designer needs to consider ways of minimising the risks of heuristic processes. For example:

• Carrying out reviews of the design to make sure that proposals are aligned to the best practice for a particular sector or to meet statutory requirements (see Chapter 10).
• Carrying out peer reviews to ratify that the design is in line with the client’s objectives and outcomes set out in the Project Brief or that it resonates with a practice’s values and design ethos.
• Ensuring that the project constraints and any assumptions are clearly understood and monitored until they have been closed out.
• Reviewing the design against the Project Strategies to ensure that these strategies are aligned with each other and the geometric aspects of the project.
• Using Decision Trees, checklists or guidance notes (see Chapter 5) to capture practice knowledge and provide a more robust basis for creating and reviewing the design.
• Reducing decision-making processes on projects by using Decision Trees to consider the design topics with which the client wants to engage.
• Considering ways of capturing and reusing information from one project to the next and sharing knowledge with the next generation of designers.

It is inevitable that topics will be forgotten about if designers use wholly heuristic means of designing. Furthermore, with a greater number of specialist consultants providing more detailed advice on a project, the knowledge required to manage and navigate through the design process has increased. It is progressively difficult for the knowledge coordinated to reside in the head of an individual and this needs to be factored into how the lead designer works in the future.

Facilitating better decision-making

Decision-making based around intuitive processes creates design and project risks because decisions are made:

• without the right information
• on the basis of assumptions not facts
• without considering the holistic impact on the design
• without recognising that one decision can impact on many aspects of the design
• without proper discussion or the right specialist present
• without considering regulations or the view of stakeholders.

Decision Trees, checklists and guidance (see Chapter 5) can provide greater clarity of the decision-making processes used by the lead designer and cause a shift towards a knowledge-centric design process. Some will be concerned that mapping out this knowledge in detail gives away the ‘crown jewels’ of the lead designer i.e. the knowledge and experience underpinning the coordination process. They should be comforted that this information alone does not result in great coordination. This requires good design skills, great communication and facilitating the right meetings and workshops at the right time along with the project experience required to maintain and update such information. Besides, these tools can be kept below the radar and not made available to everyone in the project or design team.

The benefit of the lead designer adopting Decision Trees, checklists and guidance is that it allows a shift away from the knowledge of the individual towards the knowledge of a practice and onwards to industry-wide knowledge. Digital tools and Artificial Intelligence (AI) love rules, and as more is mapped and understood about the design process it is inevitable that Decision Trees, checklists and guidance will lead to greater automati...