... is an academic working in the construction sector mainly by research but also by teaching and consultancy.
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) have absolutely 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.
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…
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!
Remember this fantastic video laying down the principles of the Keynesian (the predominant model currently informing policy) and the Austrian School of Economics?
They’re back with another exposition of the thinking. Sadly not as detailed this time and with too much focus on Keynes, but still *well* worth ten minutes of anyone’s time:
I finally managed to get the time to produce this network:
It represents the social network of undergraduate students in the “third year” of their studies. However, those highlighted in red are students who have joined the programme directly in that year having either prior education or appropriate industry experience.
They’re obviously quite isolated, but this is to be expected as the data was - after passing ethics committee - collected in their first few weeks at the University. The plan is to update the data set now, some four months later, to see if they have integrated into the cohort.
At the same time, I surveyed their attitudes toward academic study and a marked difference between their perceptions between new and “time-served” students was observed. This survey will also be repeated to see if a process of acculturation or assimilation has occured.
These issues are important as the injection of notable numbers of direct entry studies into the later years of an established cohort has consequences on social cohesion and, it is hypothesised, attitudes to academic endeavour. It will hopefully be possible to infer some understanding of this influence from this data.
