Design innovation in the construction industry is no longer the domain of architects and engineers; those ‘traditional designers’. There is, now, a fast emerging player in the construction design innovation space: ‘The Builder’.

I see that there are two fundamental drivers to this:

• Cadets joining our larger commercial building firms are increasingly likely to have a construction degree – engineering, quantity surveying, construction management or architecture. Having a degree-qualified builder is nothing new; rather it is the number entering the employ of building firms that has changed.
• The rise of PPPs and Alliances as entities where each participant’s fortunes are irrevocably linked to the other members’, dictates that all players have equality in the team structure and input into the design process from day one.

Add in Building Information Modelling (BIM), which sees the builder and consultants all working off a centralised, real-time, multi-dimensional model; and the hierarchical order that historically prevailed is diminished.

Recently, the NZIOB had the opportunity to demonstrate the value of buildability to the country’s brightest architectural and engineering students. The forum was ArchEng, a design competition that pairs 12 top architectural students with 12 top engineering students.

Exposing tomorrow’s construction leaders to the principles and value of buildability design skills at such an early stage of their careers will, we believe, produce significant benefits for the construction industry and its clients.

A practitioner of construction design innovation is no longer typecast. They are no longer the architect or the engineer; rather, they are a construction design team member.

As the professional institute that has been representing all construction design team members since 1983, the NZIOB celebrates the rise of buildability as a design discipline. Regardless of what the practitioner’s core discipline may be, the NZIOB champions you all.