Bryden Wood’s Platform approach to Design for Manufacture and Assembly (P-DfMA) is a system that delivers efficiencies across the entire construction process by applying the principles of manufacturing.. Bryden Wood have taken the P-DfMA approach for the design of multiple projects, like Landsec’s The Forge office development in London, where we have followed the hierarchies described above..
This is the power of productisation, Marks says, elaborating on her previous metaphor by saying that when you build a “man-made reef in the middle of the ocean... ecosystems build around it.”.Bringing up digital twins, she reiterates that it’s only through productisation, not process, that we’ll have the level of certainty needed to be able to do things correctly and to the best effect.
However, she cautions that we can’t just jump straight from our current position, which she likens to “crawling out of the primordial ooze,” to an end goal of mass customisation akin to ordering a bespoke, Nike shoe.. Jaimie Johnston says that at the moment, there are still too many breaks in the digital chain to get us exactly where we need to go.. “We never get operational data in a particularly sensible format,” he says.“You know, the statutory approvals process isn't digital.”.He says that to get the benefits we’re seeking, all of these other aspects need to be reconciled first, and one of the things that will enable that is productisation.
It’s not really “anything to do with DfMA,” he says, or whether it's a panelised, or volumetric or Platform system.“You're miles away from that if we don't get all of these other ecosystem elements in place to support it.”.
Johnston recalls a bathroom pod project early in his own career, where the beautifully designed, millimetre-perfect pods had to be inserted into a traditionally built building.. Aiming for efficiency in such modular projects carries risk..
He says that far too much time was spent fixing the gaps between the manufactured and traditional parts.If we look more broadly into the living world, we can see that size and scale are really important factors in function, efficiency, and survival.
Human beings are not accidentally the size we are.We’re a size that allows us to travel long distances.
We developed in the Rift Valley in Africa, a landscape that was rapidly changing, in relative terms, creating new and diverse habitats.To survive and exploit this, we needed to be able to travel, develop technologies (fire and tools), problem solve, and adapt.
(Editor: Ultimate Bicycles)