Bryden Wood

We began to use the term ‘Platforms’ (P-DfMA) while working with the UK Government Ministry of Justice (MOJ), the Infrastructure Projects Authority (IPA) and the Manufacturing Technology Centre (MTC).

It was the MTC that first introduced us to the concept of Platforms. The MOJ wanted to design a new type of prison focused on rehabilitation. We realised that the manufacturing component of the construction process could be taught to serving prisoners, helping to train them in marketable skills for use on release, and aiding rehabilitation.

We also realised that the sort of P-DfMA systems we were designing for the MOJ could then be transferred across to other government infrastructure projects, thereby facilitating the wider adoption of these beneficial, lean construction processes.

Bryden Wood published the first book on platform design in 2017 (available to download here) and we have continued to expand on and optimise Platforms and other MMC methodologies in our work with both public and private sector clients.

We’ve never sought to patent our work and we have open sourced the code for both of our construction design apps – SEISMIC and PRISM. Our goal is to bring about maximum benefit for the wider industry and society. We encourage our clients to join us on this journey by allowing others to benefit from the knowledge and systems we create for each project.

This creates a kind of reinforcing circle across the public and private sectors. By working together, we believe the industry can apply these transformative, design to value processes at scale and thereby deliver enormous benefit for the world. 

In fact, we’re already seeing a wide range of benefits from the adoption of Platforms (P-DfMA) and our wider approach using modern methods of construction. Our recent work in the UK with Landsec on a modular office building project has demonstrated the following advantages: the automation of processes leading to a 30-50% reduction in the numbers of people onsite, an increase in safety as a result of reduced work at height, lower capital costs with a 25% reduction in materials due to component optimisation, and a 13% improvement in speed.

Already impressive, we expect these metrics will only continue to improve over time.

To read more about Bryden Wood’s work on P-DfMA, visit our website here.