New Client Guides

A couple of new publications now up on the website:

Circulation in Multi-service Facilities : A quick reference guide to the implications of different organisational diagrams on the utility, amenity and cost of shared facilities. This publication helps client teams explore the benefits and implications of different models of facility where a number of different services are coming together.

Commissioning Healthcare Environments : quick reference guides for Project Board Members and for Stakeholders involved in briefing and agreeing the design of new and reconfigured facilities; developed to help clinicians, and others, who are inexperienced in commissioning building works to understand the process and how, through intelligent design, to get the most from it. These guides cover all the main stages including the business case, briefing, selecting your delivery team, and developing and agreeing the design, including links to additional information and help at each stage.

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Planning Cities : Public Assets

Getting the most out of healthcare development starts a long time before even the breifing stage - it starts at the point we set strategies for the development of our communities and decide where new homes might be and how they will be linked and served. Often new health facilities are criticised for being in the wrong place, but they can only be where there is land available close(ish) to the population they need to serve. Therefore how we plan community development directly impacts how effectively we can plan the healthcare estate needed to support that developing community.

We've been working at this interface, seeing how city planning and service planning can work better together.

We've just published a study linking the two together. Using Inverness as an example, this paper models the potential effect on the number and nature of healthcare facilities required to serve the changing City. The study looks at the changing strategies for healthcare provision, the potential infrastructure needed to support this and how that might map onto three ‘city scenarios’ considered during the City Visioning and Local Development Plan process, to help understand the impact on public sector service provision (and the public purse) of different development planning strategies.

Although the mapping shown here relates solely to healthcare facilities, similar effects might be anticipated in relation to other public service infrastructure.

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Relative Values

“....so which takes precedence, the momentary view of a historic monument from a road junction or the view from the window of a child’s hospital room?”

....apparently, for some, this is a difficult choice....

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Making Space

Last week saw the annual congress of the Academy of Urbanism take place Scotland. There was a real sense that planning and urban design was changing from simply describing spatial patterns of streets and squares and buildings to understanding the life in a community and freeing up space to facilitate that life to grow and improve. The one fly in the ointment, particularly for a discipline that grew out of a health promotion agenda, was that the redevelopment of Scotland’s more deprived communities was not having the positive impact on health that was hoped. Although there is good understanding that communities structures need to support healthy lifestyles choices; there was little understanding that part of community life – the way people access public service – is changing.

Development planning is, in many areas, working on the basis of an outdated mode of service provision – one where the local health service is a GP practice, but you go to hospital for most anything else. With health services being more about managing long term conditions in the community; and the move to more services, and more co-ordinated services, being based in the community, the needs placed on the physical infrastructure of a neighbourhood in terms of buildings and connections change. Planning communities where small plots are scattered about for different service types limits the potential for joined up services. Providing only for the ‘walkable’ choice can make health services less accessible to the most poorly, for whom a 15 minute walk or the bus may not be realistic options, and also makes peripatetic services difficult. Combined, these could lead to public sector commissioners choosing edge of town sites where larger plots allow more services to come together, more room for parking and better road connections for out-reach and in-reach services. If development planning doesn’t catch up with service planning, and make spaces and places for well connected community services and assets, we’re in danger of the public sector being forced to repeat the ‘out-of-town’ move that retail made; with this we miss the opportunities that public sector investment could bring to improve the life, amenity and impression of our local community centres.

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Author

The authorship of a building, unlike that of a novel, isn't the work of a single soul: it owes as much to the imagination of the client as the penmanship of the design hand. However each has the role of the author as described by novelist John Irving, paraphrased as "to strengthen weak hearts and soften hard hearts".

For clients it is in leading sometimes nervous people to develop and hold to a visionary brief; for architects it's designing an environment which will effect just that change in the people who inhabit it.

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Lost in Translation

There’s an old joke about lawyers being the only people who, with straight face, call a 700 page document a brief. Look at a brief for a new healthcare building and you may get the same impression of project managers. As we work with client teams to introduce the idea of design statements we're finding some people have to unlearn 20 years experience of technical writing to start to describe the fundamental human needs that their project must support and nurture. Users get it very quickly, and designers can pick up from their intent. Our hopes and desires don’t translate well through technical mediums, so write it in human.

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The God of Small Things

Often when we’re working with clients we’re talking about getting the big moves right – the right people, the right site, the right site layout. But recently I was reminded how the little things can work against those big moves: for example doors. We were looking at a great development, one that gets all the big things right. It’s a joy to be in, is easy to find your way round, flexible... great! But the doors (which are not on hold open devices) have become an everyday bar to the staff, a psychological barrier to joined up working.

As Arundhati Roy wrote "Little events, ordinary things, smashed and reconstituted. Imbued with new meaning. Suddenly they become the bleached bones of a story." A reminder to myself to delight in the detail also.

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talktalk

We’ve been doing wee studies on various process issues from Strategic Asset Management to Post Occupancy Evaluation and there’s a common thread coming through : talking and listening.

The skills needed to operate effectively in the space between changing service models and infrastructure investment are expansive. Professor Steven Male, discussing the issue at Improving Scotland’s Public Sector Estate, described the new Property Professional as having the ability to develop a clear line of sight between policy and technical issues – from strategic direction to briefing and construction - and the human skills to lead ‘one time only’ clients through the change needed to develop resilient infrastructure. SGHD's own Mike Baxter continued, stressing the importance of the role being played by estates staff particularly in ensuring the best results are achieved through infrastructure investment; facilities that realise benefits of co-location and provide truly healing environments.

We’re finding people with these rare skills come from a range of backgrounds; but wherever we find good practice and innovative thinking we find a key figure with a personable, pragmatic and collaborative approach who can converse as readily on matters of policy and strategy as on the position of a basin and the feel of a place.

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Desperately seeking Sylvie

I’m off to see a hub company, to talk about design management and DQI’s. What I’m hoping to find, rather than tools which simply prevent poor design, is a passion and commitment for achieving good. I’m looking for the people who, like Sylvie Pierce former CE Building Better Health LIFT, will take the hopes of NHS clients and local people and build a team who deliver on them.

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Scale and substance

Architecture is one of the few remaining cottage industries, where many work as sole practitioners and a medium scale company numbers below 50 people. In a world of supermarkets vs corner shops Architecture has, in the main, remained small scale. This is largely due to the desire by those heading the firms to stay in touch with the projects – they became architects to design. Of course larger teams are needed for larger projects and so some have grown to deal with just that. Despite the intense dialogue within the industry about craft-based vs international-scale, there are good and poor designers at all scales of practice in an industry geared up to match practice to project.

Recently however public procurement has been bundling smaller projects for ease of paperwork and economies of scale. This can mean a ‘small’ project (primary school or health centre) being given to larger practices for whom the total value of the all those projects is important, but no one project within that bundle is. However each project is vitally important to the people commissioning it and those who will use it; and here sits the mismatch in capacity and expectation.

The challenge for the cottage industry is how to provide the bespoke service that clients require in order to develop a facility that responds to local needs, whilst not wasting money reinventing the wheel. The answer probably lies around a more open and flexible approach to adopting elements of design that are tried and tested, requiring greater public ownership of that knowledge, and a way of cutting down the paperwork around appointments.

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