PROBE 19: designer feedback | Archive Titles

Designing for manageability
		Technological	complexity
		More	Less
Building management input	More	Type A Effective, but often costly	Type D Rare
Building management input	Less	Type C Risky with performance penalties	Type B Effective, but often small-scale
This diagram crystallises many of the issues discussed at the PROBE workshop. One of the main strategic messages to be reinforced by the PROBE investigations is the relationship between building complexity and available management skills writes Bill Bordass and Adrian Leaman.
Essentially you can have a more or less complicated building which has more or less management. Type A buildings are the prestige, technologically demanding buildings which the management has taken ownership of and is resourcing in management and maintenance terms. However, many buildings can be Type C buildings: technologically complex but with less than average management. These often innovative buildings can also suffer from an inappropriate procurement route, such as design and build with novated design responsibilities where lowest cost is of prime concern. There is an illusion among clients (possibly reinformed by design teams) that certain systems are natural and simple, and don’t need to be worried about. Sadly, this is often not the case. Type C buildings can also benefit from advanced technologies, as long as they are locked away in black boxes. Too often such technology gets smeared around the building, so rather than being packaged in a way which can be taken for granted on maintained by industry support, it ends up taxing the brains of the occupants. Service rules in type A buildings, where energy management takes second billing to managing the occupants. Type D buildings are relatively rare, and characterised by designers in their own buildings. They can actually tweak their systems in the way they were designed to do simply because of the underlying understanding of how the systems are meant to work. The management understand the building and are committed to obtain good performance. Unfortunately it is often not replicable, as anyone other than the designers don’t have that level of insight. Type B buildings are not necessarily the cheap low fee type buildings, because it can be argued that the ultimate in sophistication is simplicity, even if it doesn’t come cheap in designer brain-power. The speculative market tends to produce type C buildings as they are less risky for developers. Unfortunately they are more risky for occupants.