Industrialised, Integrated, Intelligent sustainable Construction - I3con

HANDBOOK 2 SUSTAINABLE CONSTRUCTION
Table 1. Transition of the Dutch construction industry (also known as the PSIBouw 8-liner)
Then what are the needs of the construction industry? A lot is known about this from many studies
carried out on this subject. For example, in the Netherlands a large research programme called
PSIBouw is just finished, wherein a number of themes are identified in which construction companies
and organisations are interested (PSIBouw, 2009). Examples of such themes are new collaboration
forms, value-driven building processes, improvement of trust between participants of building
projects, and exchange and sharing of building project information.
Another source of information is the experience of our MSc candidates who work at a construction
company or organisation for preparing their final MSc thesis. From these students we learn that there
is currently a strong interest in themes such as system engineering, value engineering, chain
integration, risk management and, again, value-oriented building processes. To summarize, there is a
strong interest from the construction industry in competences such as collaboration across disciplines
and integration of disciplines.
However, our primary focus should not be the requirements of the current construction practice, but
the requirements of the future construction practice. Of course there is less known of the future
requirements, but we have no doubt that it is necessary to pay attention to new ideas and concepts that
are not yet common in construction, but that are expected to become dominant.
Themes for Construction Innovation
Over the years, our group has identified a number of themes for the construction future. Most of these
themes have been incorporated in the so-called Living Building Concept (De Ridder, 2006), an
approach for innovative design and construction processes that can be seen as a holistic approach
based on various concepts from design theory, systems engineering, value engineering, etc. The
‘Living Building’ concept consists of:
• A vocabulary of systems and processes together with a glossary of relevant terms.
• An extensive discourse of the role of perception in building – which for the current building
paradigm unfailingly leads to great excesses in costs and time, often associated with quality
problems. This is also one of the main reasons for the development of the ‘Living Building’
concept.
• A description of the interrelationship between the economic notions such as value, purpose,
costs, price, revenue, budget, income, effectiveness, efficiency, productivity, etc.
• A description of actors, their mutual dealings and the subsequent effects thereof.
• A description of three different life expectancies (user’s life expectancy, economic life
expectancy, technical life expectancy) and their corresponding values, as well as their whole life
costs.
• A description of steering parameters and their degree of dependency on factors that are either
variable or have to be considered a constant.
81