A Review of Design Approaches + Strategies

Identification and analysis of design strategies is essential for this brief to increase our knowledge and understanding in order to provide a rationale basis and underpin the joint approach to property and asset or infrastructure design and management. These are advocated as a way to address in the healthcare sector fragmentation, duplication, redundancy, unsustainable transportation and non-standardisation due to the creation of varying levels of accommodation standards. Design strategies are important because they can aid organisations determine what to produce and do (products or outcomes), how and when to do it (process) and how consistently innovative the products are and over time perform responding to changing contexts (performance) while delivering on return on investment. They can therefore play a vital integrating role in connecting design endeavours to organisation’s business strategy, in identifying the core business and focus of an organisation, in adopting the latest technologies, translating insights into actions and their prioritisation. A brief review of a selection of the main design approaches and strategies from the many that have been advocated for architectural healthcare design in recent times is conducted to provide a suitable basis for the development of technical guidance and tools. These include interrelated design for sustainability, evidence-based design, lean health care and lean-led design, six sigma, simulation modelling, learning from completed construction projects [post-project evaluations (PPE) and post-occupancy evaluations (POE)] and varying combinations of these. Identifying approaches towards measuring and monitoring the environmental impact of new buildings and refurbishment of existing buildings is essential to respond to how best projects in future minimise direct environmental effect. The underlying premise includes the use of different materials, how to manage resources optimally and lessons learnt from the most innovative methods which have been undertaken or applied to address these issues.