Why Industrialised Construction Needs a New Design Logic
The construction industry stands at a crossroads. While the promise of industrialized construction, with its efficiencies, speed, and quality, beckons, our traditional design workflows remain stubbornly rooted in a bygone era. This incongruity, a fundamental mismatch between how we currently design and what industrialized construction demands, is hindering our progress.
For decades, the building industry has followed a design-first model. The design process is tightly sequenced: concept, schematic, detail, then construction. It’s neat on paper, logical, familiar to practitioners, and reinforced by every CAD tool and procurement standard we’ve inherited. But what happens when we shift from traditional bespoke construction to a model of industrialized construction? Suddenly, the logic breaks.
Industrialized construction tenants that buildings are assembled from manufactured systems and supplier-defined components; the traditional design workflows become a constraint, not a guide. The incongruency is glaring. You can’t treat buildings like product manufacturing, then insist on starting every project with a blank sheet of paper.
A significant hurdle lies in the limitations of our current design tooling. Today’s CAD and BIM tools excel at describing a design and documentation but were never created to enable the design process itself and are inherently unsuited for the critical upstream work of assessing development potential and integrated decision-making. Nor does traditional design process allow for the expertise of contractors, manufacturing, and supply chain to influence the early design stages. This fundamental disconnect means that many existing tools and the process are not fit for purpose to enable the future of industrialized construction.
Even next generation “BIM 2.0” solutions are finding themselves shoehorned into existing conceptual, schematic, and detailed design paradigms, limiting their transformative potential. Almost all these solutions appear to be largely confined to the concept and feasibility design stages. This raises a crucial question: why has it proven so challenging to effectively facilitate design further downstream, into the detailed engineering and manufacturing phases?
As an industry, we lack the intuitive tools that can codify how buildings are made and how they are designed rather than what they are.
To make industrialised construction and configuration truly possible, we need to rewire our design approach for structured and engineered solutions from the outset.
Yet, a logical tension exists: how can an engineered detail design be produced without a prior conceptual design?
This apparent break in logic can only be effectively addressed by embracing a higher level of standardization in design components and a higher level of understanding construction, manufacturing, and assembly processes.
A New Design Logic for a New Era
To truly embrace industrialized construction, we must rewire our processes. This means incorporating manufacturing and supplier information from the outset, not as an afterthought. It demands that the creators of our buildings work in closer collaboration with clients, starting with a rich understanding of what needs to be made rather than facing blank sheets of paper.
The Future of AEC Software Specification highlights this essential shift, advocating for solutions that build upwards from structured building blocks—the supply chain, the systems, the kit of parts—rather than drawing downwards from conceptual abstractions. This approach flips the script: procurement and manufacturing constraints drive design, detailed engineering emerges upfront, and intelligent, automated coordination replaces manual design processes.
Our approach, as envisioned by Podium.io, aims to address this by codifying both design and methodology. From a “Podium” perspective, design becomes a subset activity within a larger, integrated process of configuring, engineering, and producing. It is no longer an isolated pursuit. Our Contextual Universal Building System (CUBS) data model, for example, captures not just geometry, but also specification, performance, and the methodology of every building element as it is configured. This holistic approach is crucial for unlocking the true potential of industrialized construction. Design happens throughout, but as a means, not an end. This approach makes early decisions more informed, supply chains more integrated, and building processes more repeatable.
In other words, it makes industrialized construction actually industrial.
Traditional “waterfall” design processes are monolithic and linear, structured as one-way sequences from concept to detail. We push forward quickly but hesitate to revisit decisions because going back means rework, delays, and added cost.
Automation gives us the chance to change that entirely. With Podium, design becomes so fast that time is no longer a constraint. Iteration, exploration, and refinement happen without penalty.
Design Agents begin by generating an engineered, buildable configuration for structure and MEP, providing instant feedback on constructability and cost. From there, users can drive deeper specificity for technical design, or loop back to adjust parameters as new inputs emerge to refine outcomes. Podium sits at the center of this bi-directional workflow, connecting spatial configuration, engineering logic, and cost analysis in a continuous feedback loop. The result is a fluid design environment—where speed, certainty, and buildability are no longer trade-offs, but managed concurrent outcomes.
Rethinking Procurement for Industrialised Construction
True industrialized construction necessitates a paradigm shift in how we procure and execute design, alongside a transformation in how we engage the broader construction and supply chain. It represents a natural evolution of “Design & Build” (D&B) contracting. While D&B is often viewed through the lens of client risk transfer or as a turnkey solution, its core benefit lies in having the contractor responsible for both design and delivery. The nature of the contract structure leads to a much greater focus on practical buildability from the very outset of design. Industrialized construction amplifies this advantage by moving beyond merely integrating construction and design; it pushes the entire supply chain to the forefront of the design process.
Whilst I am likely to draw out the ire of my own profession; traditional design, bid-build contracting, particularly Architect-led multi-disciplinary design teams, simply does not align with enabling industrialized construction. Instead, true D&B approaches, especially in an industrialized context, demand active, early engagement of supply chain, aligning procurement strategies with the production logic intrinsic to industrialized construction. Only by truly adjusting our procurement models of both design disciplines and contractors, can we bring these integrated capabilities and supply chains forward into early stages to fully realize the potential of productization and industrialized methods.
Why This Matters
Our industry faces profound and pressing challenges: decarbonization, labor shortages, housing shortfalls, and capital inefficiency. The imperative to deliver more with fewer resources demands a fundamental rethink of how buildings are conceived and delivered. Yet we remain tethered to a process which treats every building as a unique project rather than a scalable system.
Industrialized construction isn’t just a new way of building; it’s a new way of thinking. It demands that makers of buildings move upstream, working shoulder-to-shoulder with clients at the very inception of a project. It requires early-stage collaboration, treating supply-chain logic as foundational rather than ancillary, and reorienting our tools and strategies to match this reality.
And it demands tools and procurement strategies that reflect this reality. This shift must directly match the desired outcomes of industrialized construction. If we believe that the future of AEC software lies in empowering design configurators; tools that enable us to configure a building rather than merely draw one, then we must fundamentally rethink how we approach design from the ground up.
A Call to Rewire
To truly embrace industrialised construction, we must let go of outdated workflows and procurement models. The future of building production relies on software and processes that are inherently collaborative, supplier-integrated, and manufacturing-informed. By aligning our tools and workflows with this vision, we can unlock the full potential of industrialised construction—reshaping our industry not through competition among solutions, but through unified innovation towards a common goal.
The next wave of AEC software, true BIM 2.0, won’t succeed by mimicking legacy workflows. It must rewire them. That means replacing the tired rhythm of concept-to-detail with a more dynamic loop of configure-to-produce. That means integrating engineering and procurement from day one. That means accepting that design is no longer the main act; it’s a supporting one.
The time for incremental change is over. To truly build a future of efficient, sustainable, and high-quality construction, we must be bold enough to reimagine the very foundation of our design processes. Only then can we unlock the full potential of industrialized construction.
Because if we continue designing buildings like it’s 2005, we’ll never build them like it’s 2035.
