TY - JOUR
T1 - Designers’ perspective on the use of automation to support regulatory compliance in healthcare building projects
AU - Soliman-Junior, Joao
AU - Tzortzopoulos, Patricia
AU - Kagioglou, Michail
N1 - Funding Information:
This paper includes results from the research project ?Recommendations for automated checking of regulations and requirements management in healthcare design? funded by the Centre for Digital Built Britain, under Innovate UK grant [number RG96233].
Publisher Copyright:
© 2022 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.
PY - 2022/2/1
Y1 - 2022/2/1
N2 - Automation has been long explored to improve regulatory compliance during building design. Despite substantial research efforts on developing means to enable this process, there has been limited success in practical implementations. Designers’ inputs are often undervalued in such developments, leading to solutions that are not effectively incorporated into the design process. This issue is even more difficult in healthcare projects due to their complexity and convoluted regulatory frameworks. In this paper, we describe how designers perceive the use of automation to support regulatory compliance in healthcare projects, through the analysis of a series of semi-structured interviews. We found that regulatory documents have a large influence on design and their compliance often consists of an unformalised process in practice. Furthermore, we identified that subjectivity is perceived in requirements as needed due to the creativity involved in design, whereas automation can be understood as liberating in this context depending on how it is used. Improvement needs focussing on the revision of the regulatory framework as well as on software development have been highlighted by participants during the interviews, which led to the proposition of recommendations to help achieve their benefits in practice.
AB - Automation has been long explored to improve regulatory compliance during building design. Despite substantial research efforts on developing means to enable this process, there has been limited success in practical implementations. Designers’ inputs are often undervalued in such developments, leading to solutions that are not effectively incorporated into the design process. This issue is even more difficult in healthcare projects due to their complexity and convoluted regulatory frameworks. In this paper, we describe how designers perceive the use of automation to support regulatory compliance in healthcare projects, through the analysis of a series of semi-structured interviews. We found that regulatory documents have a large influence on design and their compliance often consists of an unformalised process in practice. Furthermore, we identified that subjectivity is perceived in requirements as needed due to the creativity involved in design, whereas automation can be understood as liberating in this context depending on how it is used. Improvement needs focussing on the revision of the regulatory framework as well as on software development have been highlighted by participants during the interviews, which led to the proposition of recommendations to help achieve their benefits in practice.
KW - Healthcare Design
KW - Automation
KW - Regulatory requirements
KW - Compliance checking
KW - automation
KW - Healthcare design
KW - compliance checking
KW - regulatory requirements
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85122797687&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1080/01446193.2021.2022176
DO - 10.1080/01446193.2021.2022176
M3 - Article
VL - 40
SP - 123
EP - 141
JO - Construction Management and Economics
JF - Construction Management and Economics
SN - 0144-6193
IS - 2
ER -