Understand risk
Tracing where risk enters a project, starting with the earliest design decisions, and how it is recognised by the people involved.
Research × Built Environment
Rethinking riskin construction.
Researching better decisions for a more resilient built environment.
Improve decisions
Exploring how designers, clients and contractors make choices under uncertainty, and what would help them choose better.
Build resilience
Treating projects as living systems that adapt, so that risk is designed out early instead of managed late.
The challenge
Every project is a set of decisions made before the facts are in.
A building is shaped long before anyone arrives on site. Choices made in the first design stages, about form, sequence, materials and who is involved, set conditions that contractors and occupants live with years later. Yet the people making those choices rarely see the consequences, and the people managing the consequences rarely see the choices.
Construction is also not a simple chain of cause and effect. Clients, designers, contractors, regulators and digital tools all act on one another, adapt, and produce outcomes nobody planned. This research treats a project as a complex adaptive system and asks how risk can be understood, anticipated and reduced within it.
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The research
An investigation into risk, uncertainty and decision-making.
DE—RISKING CONSTRUCTION is doctoral research into design risk management: how early-stage design decisions create, move or remove risk across the life of a project.
It draws on the experience of practising professionals in the United Kingdom, with a comparative perspective from Singapore, and uses systems thinking to map how information, governance and technology interact. The aim is practical: clearer insight for the people who commission, design and deliver buildings.
Research themes
Six areas of enquiry.
ProvisionalThese are proposed categories and may change as the research develops.
- 01
Design decisions and downstream risk
How choices made in the earliest design stages shape the risks that surface during construction and use.
- 02
Governance, culture and risk perception
How regulation, institutions and professional culture influence the way risk is seen and acted on, in the UK and Singapore.
- 03
Complexity and uncertainty
What separates a complicated project from a complex one, and why that distinction changes how risk should be managed.
- 04
Systems approaches
Using feedback loops and systems-based methods to find where intervention has the greatest effect.
- 05
Design to delivery
How risk information is carried, translated or lost as a project passes from design teams to those who build it.
- 06
Emerging technologies
What artificial intelligence and building information modelling can, and cannot yet, contribute to managing design risk.
Participate
Your experience can inform this research.
If you work in or around construction, you are invited to contribute, either through a short conversation or a survey. Taking part is voluntary.
Insights