The research

Construction projects bring together clients, designers, engineers, contractors, regulators and suppliers, each with their own priorities, information and pressures. Most of the decisions that define a project are taken in its earliest stages, when the least is known and change is cheapest.

In the United Kingdom, duties on designers and clients have been set out in law for decades, most recently through the Construction (Design and Management) Regulations 2015 and the Building Safety Act 2022. The principle is well established: risk should be eliminated or reduced at the design stage wherever possible. How consistently that happens in practice, and why, is far less well understood.

Risk in construction is usually managed as a list: identify, score, assign, monitor. That approach assumes risks are separate, stable and predictable. Projects do not behave that way. Decisions interact, people adapt, information changes as it moves between organisations, and outcomes emerge that no single party intended.

This research starts from a different assumption: that a construction project is a complex adaptive system. The question is then not only which risks exist, but how the arrangement of people, processes and technology around early design decisions makes risk more or less likely to emerge later.

1. 01To understand how design-stage decisions influence risk during construction and use.
2. 02To examine how governance, professional culture and communication shape the way risk is perceived by different project participants.
3. 03To map the feedback relationships between people, processes and technology that amplify or dampen risk.
4. 04To compare how these dynamics play out in different regulatory settings, with a focus on the United Kingdom and Singapore.
5. 05To develop a framework that helps project teams see where early intervention would have the greatest effect.

ProvisionalWorking questions. These may be refined as the research progresses.

1. RQ1

   How do the decisions and relationships formed in early design stages influence the risks that emerge later in a project?

2. RQ2

   How do project participants adapt their approach to risk as a project develops, and what drives those adaptations?

3. RQ3

   What governance challenges do organisations face in meeting their regulatory duties around design risk?

4. RQ4

   How, and why, do different participants perceive the same risk differently?

The research combines qualitative and systems-based methods. It is grounded in the accounts of practising professionals and uses modelling to make the relationships between their experiences visible.

Professional perspectives

Interviews and focus groups with people working across design, delivery, client and regulatory roles.

Comparative study

A comparison between the United Kingdom and Singapore, two settings with different institutions, regulation and professional cultures.

Systems mapping

Causal loop diagrams and system dynamics, used to trace how information, oversight, technology and time pressure interact.

Published incident data

Analysis of publicly available accident and incident records to place individual accounts in a longer historical view.

Literature

A narrative review spanning design risk management, complexity science, systems safety and construction technology.

The intended contribution is both conceptual and practical: an account of design risk as an emergent property of project systems, and a framework that project teams can use to identify where early decisions matter most.

For industry, the aim is clearer insight into where attention at the design stage is most valuable. For research, it is a link between complexity theory and the everyday practice of managing design risk.

1. Literature review and conceptual frameworkComplete
2. Fieldwork with UK construction professionalsComplete
3. Comparative work in SingaporeIn progress
4. Systems modelling and analysisIn progress
5. Synthesis, framework and publicationUpcoming