Article#4How Building Design Imperatives constrain construction productivity and quality: Engineering Construction and Architectural Managment 2002

Since the early 1960’s building construction has been criticised for low productivity, it has been widely recognised that the building design has significant impact on the building construction performance. Recently there has been interest in concurrent engineering, which involves designing products and their related processes and systems coinciding with each other to achieve the best possible balance between form, function and production. Designing for maximised repetition is one way to avoid low productivity.

Design application can be a difficult one to design with maximised repetition coinciding with other buildings. If asked to design for a specific site that has existing buildings which needs to be linked would create a difficult one to reproduce if asked to place it at another location. But buildings such as port-a-cabins can be built and designed in a standard way, which makes the most of repetition between the buildings.
So market specific design results in high volume goods, where location specific designs often result in low volume goods. For example the footprint of a building is effected by adjacent buildings and natural features of the site.
Many new buildings are tailored designed because of the continuing demand for safer construction operations, such as excavation.

Customer-led designing for buildings usually leads to the architects and engineers designing for specific needs of functionality and appearance. Thus it being hard to design with repetition as components will change throughout the process, making it hard to pre-order construction components. There are too many variables such as budget, clients ideas my change during design and construction.
Customer-led design is often lead to tailored goods, whereas custom design or standard products can cater for producer-led designs.

Designers are also expected to have the latest high performance structure components which leads to every new design will be an original. These factors limit architects and engineers to design buildings, which can be built multiple times in different locations. This then limits them to work with manufacturers in the design of mass production, building specific, components.

The constant change of design when it comes to customer-led buildings means more and more products needing to be tailored for specific job. This leads to hurried production time, which leads to quality problems. In contrast producer-led market specific design results in there being high repetition, which allows computer systems to perform the component configurations.

Bricks, plasterboards, drainage pipes and heating pipes are examples of standard materials and parts. Raised floor tile system and suspended ceiling systems are both examples of custom materials, which generally are produced for stock. It is more feasible and viable for engineers to use these products in the buildings compared to specific designed products.

Looking at these aspects it appears that construction productivity and quality must be continuously improved to meet clients needs. Product-specific systems and processes are feasible and viable when it is producer-led and market specific, although often the building is customer-led and location specific.