From designing the brief to considering how elements should be delivered on site to how best to engage the supply chain to how to repurpose existing technology – these things were always central to the Design to Value thinking, even before being labelled as such.. Design to Value purports that the front-end of the project needs to focus on developing data to support decision making at all stages of a meandering process – where each decision step is influenced by the one before.

Although the circular economy market is in its infancy, by considering material reuse during the earliest design stages we can help build that marketplace.In time, this market will help to further reduce material costs..

Following through the circular economy idea to the end of a building’s life, simple design choices allow new materials to be reused at that stage.Using reversable joints for steelwork connections so that beams and columns can be disassembled in their primary form, allows them to be re-used rather than be melted down and recycled as a raw material.Intumescent paint has to be manually chipped off steelwork before it can be recycled or reused, so choosing to use boarding for fire protection is a better sustainable design choice.

These decisions have little cost impact when they are integrated into the building’s design, but can help create – and sustain – the circular economy..Extending a building’s life, or giving it a second life through refurbishment, reduces the need to use yet more building materials for its replacement.

Designing adaptable buildings enables the function to change depending on its users’ needs.

If COVID has taught us anything, it’s that workplaces and homes both need to be flexible to account for changing work patterns.Sharp says that what we really need is something more free-flowing, and adds that we should be nudging the market in the right direction as it develops so that we end up with an optimally connected set of systems..

However, we’re also going to need to definitively demonstrate that the sharing of data will lead to capturable benefits, because such benefits are distributed, and until we demonstrate that, people won’t be motivated to take things forward.We want the people who invest to continue to invest.

Sharp points out that we use a lot of energy to make water, and a lot of water to make energy.We need to understand which is the most economically efficient, and which is the best for the environment.