Evaluation Of Effective Design In Architectural Design Process

Evaluation of effective design procedure is a difficult method to measure the performance of drawings. How can the architect manage this method effectively? How can they understand deeply in the role of design process? It is really a challenging task for them. For these above reasons, their experiences must be trained and modern technology methods applied in order to achieve as much best result as possible. Regarding to the way that the architect can manage the design process efficiently and effectively, they use a standardized method of measurement and common database.

Nowadays, construction is one of the most important industries in the country’s economy and still continuing to support an increasing proportion of the economy development. The construction industry plays a major role in the development of Vietnam. With the existing high growth, the demanding of all aspects concern constructability is also going along with this development. The overall economic situation will grow consistently at a relative high in future under the forecast of World Bank and the Asian Development Bank (ADB). Thus, the construction industry will have a good environment to develop. Many constructors and design professionals were also approached in Viet Nam by investors to assist them to develop their project. Moreover, in order to survive and emulate against experienced competitors, these methods to control the quality of design process should be applied. Evaluation of design effectiveness has been proved by particular evidences to play significant role for success or frustration of projects.

In practice, the concept of design measurement activities in design phase was an expectation for the perfectibility of output-drawings. Unfortunately, the traditional design consultant only pays attention to the process of design and planning projects lead to lack of concentration how to estimate this design process.

Design quality of construction project in Vietnam has been fallen down significantly because the designers have too many projects simultaneously. They had difficulty in controlling their works efficiently and smoothly. Main reasons for these bad situations were derived from the lack of effective methods in evaluating the effective design process. Most of designers do not realize this evaluation concept. They cannot utilize a powerful tool to managing their work.

Therefore, project participants faced many adverse factors influenced from design process such as: late or inaccurate drawings, maintainability, expensive changes originate, no specific details in technical drawing, and so forth.

There are following backwards usually impact on design stage of construction projects:

- Normally, the design phase of project is difficult to measure than the construction phase because the measurements are too simplicity and the quality of output in the design phase are not realized until has begun.

- There are limitations from the simplistic measurements such as: cost per drawing, man hours per drawings, etc., because of variations in drawing size and content. Furthermore, it consolidates realization that the downstream effects of a good or poor design process will multiply many times in the construction phase of project (Tucker and Scarlett, 1986).

- The most general indicators of design effectiveness are the ratio of design man hours per drawing. While this ratio may be an effective indicator of designer productivity, it does not address the expensive design-related problems projects occur construction stage (Tucker and Scarlett, 1986).

- The project designs are evaluated on cost design because cost is an important criterion in any design evaluation, but cost alone does not consider for the effects of design upon construction process.

From these problems mentioned above, the understanding of important performance measurement is applied to improve strategic design management (Amaratunga et al., 2001). It is necessary to find out a reasonable method to evaluate and control the design process. The designers should focus on improving their skills and increases the quality of drawing. In addition, if a post-project evaluation is assessed particularly, it becomes a potential tool for design management guide in forthcoming projects.

With high demand in improvement of design aspect, Vietnam construction requires all design professional commit in quality of design functions. Mr. Nguyen Kim The Anh made

a study to improve the quality design process for consulting and design architectural companies. To accomplish his objectives, four specific sub-objectives must be also accomplished:

1. Analyzing the current design management systems of Vietnamese design-consultant Company to identify the necessary improvement.

2. Defining performance of design output to clarify the meaning of design effectiveness.

3. Defining effectiveness criteria for Design Objective Matrix to apply for Vietnamese design-consultant Company.

4. Defining effectiveness criteria could apply on design architectural process for Vietnamese design-consultant Company.

Conclusions

1. The seven important criteria measuring design effectiveness immediately after construction and relevant regardless of construction category, construction activity, design user, or project variable are: Accuracy of Design Documents, Usability of Design Documents, Cost of the design, Constructability of Design, Economy of design, Performance against schedule, Ease of start-up.

2. The design evaluation matrix can be used by any design user for any projects type or phase.

3. The criteria and weights used in the matrix can be modified by the evaluator to fit any project, and the evaluation can adapt to most needs.

4. The matrix can be as simple (subjective ratings) or sophisticated (sub-matrices) as desired or needed.

5. The design evaluation matrix can track and compare performance over time and measure impact of various criteria.

6. The design evaluation matrix is feasible. As has been proved by the design evaluation matrix for piping, all data necessary to measure the criteria can be obtained or estimate.

7. The seven design evaluation criteria have proven to be meaningful, and can be quantified by various sub-criteria ratios and subjective ratings. The criteria have also proven fairly comprehensive, as no suggestions were made for additional criteria.

8. Not all the data required for the feasibility test, and for the evaluation itself, is readily at hand in some companies. Since no interviewees questioned the significance or relevance of the criteria, or could offer other measurements, the problem is not inappropriate or inapplicable criteria. Instead, this problem points out the need for a method such as the design evaluation matrix as a means of evaluation.

9. The data from the industry interviews can be inserted into evaluation matrices and used to evaluate piping design.

10. Ratio measures provide a better means of evaluation than do subjective ratings. The subjective ratings are consistently higher than the industry average at score three, and by raising performance indices this may prove misleading. Quantitative measures need to be identified for all sub-criteria.

11. It is possible to track the performance of each of the criteria using the performance index of the criterion evaluation matrix. When compared to past performance indices, the increase of this performance index indicates improvement or decline in the performance of the criterion.

12. The performance index might also be used to measure the affect on projects of the project variables of the schedules, size, and types of contract. Further study of proper use of the matrix may indicate a relationship in movement of performance index due to changes in the variables.

His thesis abstract is copied and posted.

ABSTRACT

Design effectiveness method has the potential to significantly benefits for consulting – design architectural companies to issue the best value outputs design to customers, while improves quality, reduces cost and shortens time. However, it is not widely know and applied on Vietnamese design construction field. Thus, the research focuses on main issues of current management system and design effectiveness method to find the best efficiencies and acceptability criteria suitable with Vietnamese consulting – design architectural companies. The data is mainly collected from thirty respondents at twenty-three companies who currently work on medium and large size design-consultant Vietnamese Company. The research could be utilizing questionnaires design as an efficiency tool to collect responses. The method of breaking responses’ survey is multiple rating list scale. The values “means” were considered as the benchmark to asset and rank the ratio of respondent’s perception on their responses. These results could reflect overall viewpoints of respondents toward research’s objective.

The finding shows higher knowledge and application of traditional management over new management. Meanwhile, design effectiveness method is not introduced widely in design companies. The research recommends solutions to improve management system to satisfy the research objectives. This action will enhance more application of design effectiveness method and boost up the effectiveness, efficiency abilities for Design Company to overtake with famous rivals on design architectural field.