Articles:

The problem I have with the way we’ve taken Smith’s thoughts and works is that it is piecemeal and skewed – we’ve latched onto some of his insights without exploring them more widely.

It’s up to the services engineer to fully understand the client laboratory equipment, the room requirements, the health and safety issues and the processes within the lab, as well as understanding what the other disciplines need to provide.The purpose of the lab space is to provide the users with a safe and controlled environment for their experiments and processes, which are undertaken by and within lab equipment.

The equipment is the primary point of a lab.This equipment is often heavily serviced, so the services take priority; perhaps much more so than in other building types.It’s the services engineer’s responsibility to coordinate the disciplines and disseminate information to all the relevant parties to ensure their services can be properly provided..

Following a review of the functional spaces, we will set out the basis of laboratory design in zoning diagrams for the different rooms, including any ISO or GMP requirements, pressure regimes, temperatures, air change rates, lux levels, circuit zoning, and keep all this information on a set of drawings.These types of drawings are often created at RIBA Stage 2 then never carried through the project, but it’s vital information which develops the basis for the calculations and lab design.

For labs we will therefore update this drawing at every design stage and use for quick reference..

Maintaining the client lab equipment list with all the necessary services is a must.If everyone could agree and collect information to the same standards, sharing the same pieces of information upon creation, and when changed, it would unblock the system and lead to significantly greater efficiency..

While early BIM slides had a digital thread looping operational data all the way around, in fact there are all sorts of breakpoints.The handover from construction into operation never works particularly effectively, and we never really get that kind of handover into the capital model.

Planning has always been one of the big digital breaks, where things suddenly go into quite a subjective, painful, and paper based process, and planning has long been held as a blocker to housing, amongst other things.The impact of digitising the planning process would be enormous, causing many other aspects to fall into place.. Digitising planning with RIPA and BoPS.