Articles:

With all of our Creative Technologies projects and automated design workflows at Bryden Wood, we aim to connect to other pieces of software that may be more proprietary - so that a user can carry on the design process in a more traditional way.

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.He was one of the first theorists to develop the idea of the economy of scale.

How making things bigger, growing operations tends toward greater economic efficiency.He was right, in some circumstances.The problem is that such simple rules, although alluring, can be unhelpful or plain wrong in other circumstances..

When lecturing my students, I discuss the dis-economy of scale.How large processes need large peak demands of inputs, how many design factors are not linear so doubling the size of a process can mean 4x or 8x the energy, the time, or the effort.

For some processes, a colony of ants would be much more efficient than a brontosaurus..

The point is that scale is a complex but critical issue if you are concerned with multiple factors – profitability, economic agility, sustainability, system reliability.A laboratory design should be services-led.

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.