As at Reading, our primary focus was on the quality of the user experience for patients and staff, as well as the efficiency and usability of the building..

It also required us to develop skills that internal-facing teams don’t need.Having our own clients presents us with a range of questions that we have to answer, and it requires a particular set of capabilities.

We create solutions and give them to clients – for them to use.That means our product has to work independently of us – it has to achieve a level of external usability and stability..Working in this way has also given us a lot of scope in terms of choosing what sort of team we want to be, to evolve sometimes according to the individuals who join the team, and to decide our own overall development path – but we’ve always been tethered strongly to the core intellectual drive of the company.. What is your position on AI/generative design/automation in construction/robotics in construction?.

AI relies on large data sets.These aren’t typically available in our sector so the use of AI in construction has been somewhat limited by that.

Examples of AI are often narrowly defined and only really touch a very specific part of the overall process; the part for which large data sets do exist.. ‘Generative design’ means many things, but generally it’s an approach used in the industry to solve complicated problems; you use generative design to create loads of possible solutions or scenarios, from which you choose the best..

The Design for Manufacture and Assembly (DfMA) approach that we have in Bryden Wood – which is embedded in Creative Technologies – means that something like generative design can be more powerful, as it can be built around design rules and content that’s inherently more clearly defined..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..