General design, disciplines, BIM

What this topic is about

Three things:

The process

How a design progresses from the design brief to the detailed design, and what is produced at each stage.

The participants

Which disciplines work together, who designs what, and where the boundaries of responsibility lie — because mistakes tend to arise at the boundaries.

The tools

What model-based working gives, what BIM means in practice, and what software is good for — and what it is not.

Why this belongs in a technology knowledge base

Because on light gauge steel and steelwork projects the design has to be fixed earlier than in traditional construction: manufacture happens in advance and the scope for correction on site is limited.

That means coordination between disciplines has to close earlier too. What in a masonry house “gets decided on site” goes into manufacture here.

The recurring lesson

Most problems do not come from a lack of professional knowledge but from the fact that:

• something was not decided in time,
• somebody did not know about a decision,
• or two disciplines assumed different things about the same item.

General design and model-based working target these three faults.

What you will not find here

Any particular firm’s working method, pricing or contract terms. This topic describes general professional practice.

The point

The quality of a design does not depend on the quality of the individual disciplines but on how well they fit together. That is the job of coordination.