Gismos, Gadgets and Good Design
IT & business innovations from beyond the housing sector
Professor Dr Michael Benfield
In the early ‘noughties’ I ran a seminar for ‘Constructing Excellence’ on ‘Safety by Design’,
followed a few years later by one on ‘Designing Out Waste’. The purpose in mentioning them
is to emphasise the fact that, despite new products and new and updated regulations, like
those dealing with high speed electronic communications networks (Approved document ‘R’),
the house-building industry has made little progress so far this century.
Back then I argued for buildings to be designed via ‘partnerships’ that embraced site
constraints, programmed out risk, and ensured good immediate and ongoing communications
with present and future stakeholders. I pointed out that to do so required ‘design teams’ who
not only knew their legal duties & responsibilities, but who understood how the job would be done. In turn this meant grasping the logistics,
getting to grips with handling and ‘Temporary’ works, as well as embracing snagging and maintenance along with the lifetime risks of the
building both in construction, in use and decommissioning. Stressing that ‘good design’ is SAFE I also urged participants to accept their
responsibility for making others aware of all of these risks.
While today it’s pretty easy to specify IT related products for any building, like visual or
fingerprint recognition access, remote video surveillance, cell-phone heat and light control, and
so on, doing so efficiently remains a major challenge. Indeed, arguably this is more important
than these ‘nice to have’ gismos and gadgets themselves. Home buyers and renters alike remain
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