Design Innovation Research

Following a busy summer of conferences - the European Group for Organization Studies in Gotenburg; Engineering Project Organization Conference 2011 in Denver and the Academy of Management in San Antonio - I have been reading around the issues of coordination and finalising a couple of articles ahead of the new term.

BIM Buzz

There is a buzz of activity on BIM at the moment; with the recent launch of the government's BIM strategy influencing presentations at the BuildingSMART meeting this week; and a host of other activities.

Government Strategy - Construction and BIM

The UK government has recently published its Construction Strategy, and even more recently its BIM workplan, which is published through the Built Environment KTN (https://ktn.innovateuk.org/). Hence this promises to be an interesting summer. I am involved in the ICE BIM event, which will be on the 18th October, see http://www.ice-bim.com/  We also have a whole host of ongoing research projects within the Design Innovation Research Centre at the University of Reading, with international visitors such as Assist Prof Ashwin Mahalingam (IIT Madras, India) and Prof Chimay Anumba (Penn State, USA) coming to visit us over the next few months.

BIM to FM - where management practices in projects and operations meet

There is interest in the links between Building (or Infrastructure) Information Modelling (BIM) in project delivery and the client's management of the completed buildings and infrastructure. We have started to explore this in a research context, and the preliminary findings of recent work is now online as an ICE briefing sheet.

Visual practices, organizing and management

I've been in Segovia at the great workshop that Paolo Quattrone and others organized, which brought together a range of scholars interested in the role of pictures and performances in accountability and organizing. It was interesting to discover a range of other traditions of thought that address similar questions around visual practices, organizing and management.
For me, in sessions and over lunch, the question of tradition and innovation arose - not least because the setting for the conference was a converted Dominican church, founded by Dominico himself (and my hotel in Segovia had a view of a Roman acqueduct). While I have been interested for some time in how management practices create stability and change, sitting in a chapter house that has a vaulted ceiling and the initials of Isabel and Ferdinand on the roof sets a longer context, one that is not often considered in business and organization studies.

AIM Visiting International Fellows at the University of Reading

We are looking forward to welcoming Deborah Dougherty and Paul Leonardi to the University of Reading in the next couple of weeks. The related workshops are open to any UK management scholars, and to join us please email designinnovation@reading.ac.uk

Lifecycle data management and the future for architects

Over the last couple of days, there has been an event discussing the future for architects at the Royal Institution of British Architects (RIBA), and lifecycle data management at the Institution of Civil Engineers (ICE). The two events were both compelling, but could not have been more different. The latter, organized by Bentley, was titled BS1192, and had a range of industy leaders, from across a wide range of disciplines and parts of the industry, talking about the changing nature of delivery to meet government agendas. Sustainability was high on this agenda. The former, organised by Building Futures, focused more on the architect's role, answering three questions - who will design our built environment in 2025? what roles will those trained in architecture be doing in 2025? and how might practice change in 2025?

It is clear that to create a sustainable built environment, we need to radically change the processes through which buildings and infrastructure are designed and re-designed. Sustainability is not achievable if design and operation are disconnected. Yet, too often designers start with 'a blank sheet of paper' and end up giving too little information about their design back to end-users, owners and facility managers. In our research, we are addressing the new connections between design and use that are made possible by digital systems, with an ICE briefing sheet on value to clients through data handover, and concerns about how we learn from buildings in use, and re-design in the context of existing infrastructure, which are discussed in a recent piece on Sustainable Design in the Digital Economy, page 10 in Reading Research Review.

AIM Visiting International Fellows

The University of Reading is hosting three visits from Advanced Institute of Management Research (AIM) Visiting International Fellows. Early career researchers are welcome to apply to join related capacity building workshops by emailing designinnovation@reading.ac.uk. Prof Andrew Hargadon (University of California, Davis) will be at the University on 10 February 2011, Prof Deborah Dougherty (Rutgers) on 14 March 2011, and Assist Prof Paul Leonardi (NorthWestern) on 21 March 2011. Full details are at http://www.aimresearch.org/aim-events/forthcoming-events/

BIM in New York

An interesting ENR story of BIM use in New York.

The Future of Construction Management Research

I find that I am online talking about construction management research as one of the Future Footprints taking at last year's Constructions Matter conference in Copenhagen Business School.

This is not a polished, or scripted presentation, or a particularly flattering video, but if you want to know my first reaction to a set of questions about construction research, then see below.
Future Footprints 10 from REKOMMANDERET on Vimeo.

The questions about construction management research that were put to me are: What questions to abandon? What paradox to focus on? What's next? (I had a longer answer to the last question, but the editor keeps an extended version of the answer to the second question and cuts this off)