The construction industry needs to shift its thinking towards recognising similarity and repeatability by using repeatable components to create unique systems.. Construction companies are already operating at 100% capacity or more.

So while an inpatient room is optimised for patient comfort and the facilitation of day to day care activities, an operating theatre has more complex variables to incorporate: medical procedures, heightened levels of infection control plus the associated surgical staff, flows of clean and dirty consumables, carefully controlled flows of air, extensive use of medical equipment and data etc..The optimal design, which we call the Reference Design, can then be largely created by combining these Chips in the most efficient way.

This Reference Design can then be built again and again as a fixed product, by clients who have control over site conditions, as per the MoJ Houseblocks..But for those who need flexibility, the Reference Design becomes far easier to configure flexibly into a physical asset when broken down into its ‘Chips’ (with more or less flexibility in how these are arranged depending on the asset type.)By digitally modelling the design against the given brief/constraints using Chips, we can quickly see how well the design will work, and what we can adapt to fit the wide range of needs and constraints involved.

This ability to adapt the configuration of a design would be impossible in a design expressed as 100% single components..The ‘local’ design is then focused on ground conditions, utilities, infrastructure, placemaking, flows of people etc..

Figure 2 Example configurations of healthcare Chips.

Read more about our.This level of standardisation has the capability to create fewer documents and standards, giving the market a much better opportunity to respond, he says.

Johnston feels that the adoption of a more standardised, foundational approach will act as a springboard, setting up the opportunity to work with more sophisticated industrialised construction techniques like prefab and DfMA.. Amy Marks is fine with the idea of standardisation but thinks things also depend on how performance-based, or prescriptive those standards are.She cautions that we don’t want a level of standardisation where there isn’t space for innovation, or which “precludes fabrication.”.

These things really depend on who makes the standards, she says, what they are thinking of enabling in the future, and what their understanding of the future looks like.Not all policymakers are thinking about industrialised construction, prefabrication, or DfMA.