I’ve recently developed my online presence. These days, I’m here:
Come over for more of this sort of thing, links to my academic writing and background on some of my funded work.
Thanks your readership so far - it’s been fun. Let’s see where this thing takes us…
I was at RICS last week, helping with their ‘Innovation in the Built Environment’ book series. I have to say, with the hottest day of the year so far and their awesome roof terrace, I could think of worse places to be working…
Design Management Masters students, working hard…
An opportunity exists for UK or EU nationals to compete for a funded PhD Scholarship in the School of Civil and Building Engineering at Loughborough University.
If you are at all interested in studying issues of stakeholder engagement, value, and/or the quantification of intangibles in a construction or built environment context, then please get in touch as soon as possible: d.s.thomson@lboro.ac.uk
This is a growing field and opportunities to make fundamental contributions abound!
A well designed coursework exercise should act as a framework to stimulate and direct the student’s independent study. It should reward them for discovering things and forming connections not laid out to them by their tutor. Indeed, at higher levels of study the student is fully expected to counter the tutor’s position.
Yet, having just wrapped up the latest batch of coursework marking, it’s thoroughly disappointing to see students fail to have the confidence to tell themselves things they did not already know; to question what was presented in the class and extend or challenge it. This has always been somewhat of a challenge in the modern era of the strategic (or, worse, surface) learner, but it seems particularly prominent in the work I’m seeing at the moment. Time to reconsider how tasks are set, I think.
Source: http://inspireteachers.org/
Detroit metal destroying Detroit metal
This trailer for a Sundance documentary is a perfect example of the ultimate consequence of the social obsolescence of buildings. With the failure of industry and with the building artefacts of that industry (let alone the land they sit on) havingabsolutely no monetary value to their owners (and, indeed, with their owners now absent in many cases), is this semi-organised metal theft or the death-throws of an industrialised nation? Nothing drives the point home quite like this.
This is one of the papers to come from the HaCIRIC-funded Benefits Quantification work I was doing just before coming to Loughborough. Really pleased to see it accepted by a good journal. Some of the reviewer comments were the best I’ve ever had!
The Use of Freelisting to Elicit Stakeholder Understanding of the Benefits Sought from Healthcare Buildings
Thomson, Kaka, Pronk and Alalouch
Elicitation and synthesis of the collective understanding of a cultural domain held by a group of stakeholders is challenging. This problem typifies the pre-project activity from which a coherent understanding of the benefits sought from infrastructure investment must emerge to inform the business case rationale. The anthropological freelisting method is evaluated as a solution by determining its ability to be operationalised in a practical form for project application. Using data from the stakeholders of a large NHSScotland building project, the use of multidimensional scaling for data analysis is compared with participatory pilesorting to determine which freelisting protocol balances insight with practicality. Neither approach is found to offer an ideal method of characterising sought benefits. The social construction of pilesorting promotes reliability while the analytical rigour of multidimensional scaling remains attractive to auditors. Their distinct insight suggests that both approaches should be combined in future and used alongside further post-elicitation devices from anthropology such as cultural consensus modelling or structured conceptualisation.
Ice Cube on The Eames House. This is really good.
Finally got there. Shame the curves aren’t the shape I predicted. Now to finish writing it up…
The graph may have a wry smile, but I don’t. Another Saturday night slaving away at a paper…
So, just how complicated is a construction project?
Answer - About this much:
This is a social network elicited from email communications between the client’s project manager on an average, moderately-sized project (c. £20m; no particular design or process issues). It was produced by a student with an EPSRC summer bursary who’s been working for myself and colleagues for the last ten weeks.
We’re now working on interpreting this complexity. Already, we’re characterised an interesting and hitherto unacknowledged change in the nature of the client project manager’s interactions with the rest of the construction project over time. These are associated with leadership qualities. I can’t say much more, as we’re yet to publish but suffice to say: “watch this space!”
We’re also working on identifying emergent, normative communities within all this complexity and inferring the rationale for that project structure from the nature of the low path-distance subnetworks within it.
By the way, there are over 12,000 email messages in the figure above…
The first step is to measure whatever can be easily measured. This is OK as far as it goes.
The second step is to disregard that which can’t be easily measured or to give it an arbitrary quantitative value. This is artificial and misleading.
The third step is to presume that what can’t be measured isn’t important. This is blindness.
The fourth step is to say that what can’t easily be measured really doesn’t exist. This is suicide.
Charles Handy (1995), “The Empty Raincoat” p. 219.
Why is this relevant to my work? All will be revealed shortly.
I had a great time this weekend working with past colleagues (you know who you are…) pulling together ideas on the possible form of collaborative funding.
It seems that a seismic change is coming. With new modes of building use that people just won’t understand. Tension between tradition and innovation is becoming tangible. Interesting times indeed.
With the mandating of BIM on every public sector project, rather than just those of cost greater than £50m, this debate is timely. While I agree with their position that “BIM” is really just a collection of useful tools that address the spatiality of buildings, I did get lost on the more technical stuff.
Buried in the discussion (for the TL;DR’ers out there…), this gem is forwarded: ten things BIM is not.
So, over the past few weeks I’ve been simulating some value management workshops for our final year students. Based on the level of engagement, positive attitude, and genuine emails of thanks recevied, I think we can say that it went well.
Here they are in action (the photos are by the students themselves):
Group A, compiling a FAST Diagram:
Group B, organising an affinity diagram: 
Group C, identifying project functions:
Group D, affinity diagramming:
Group E, rating primary functions:
Group F, brainstorming:
Group G, searching for project functions:
Group H, reviewing the design:
Group I, thinking hard:
Group J, eliciting the client’s value system:
Group K, also working on the client’s value system:
Group L, making some pairwise comparisons:
Group M, searching for project functions:
Group N, also searching for their project functions:
If nothing else, I think these workshops will have taught the students the usefulness of the humble post-it note!
