HaCIRIC Conference

The second annual conference of HaCIRIC (Health and Care Infrastructure Research and Innovation Centre) took place in Brighton these last two days. It was in the Brighton Metropole Hotel, on the seafront, although the location could have been anywhere, because, typically, none of the rooms we used had any windows, and the decor was standard 1980s stuff, which could have been anywhere in the world. But when we ate, we had great views of the sea. The presentations at the conference were very good indeed, ranging from strategic health planning through to the way that stroke patients were dealt with in UK compared with USA. It was really useful being able to connect the way that health services are planned with the funding, design and construction of the facilities themselves. As before, many of us found ourselves questioning why the health service needs capital assets, and struggling with the tensions between the needs for operational efficiency on the one hand, and the iconic value a hospital has for the community in which it is based. It seems that local politics demands that every community can identify itself with a hospital of some kind. National politics demands that vote-catching policies are more important than evidence-based health care. And no one wants to pay for health care, apparently. It certainly brought home to me the difficulty of developing a rational and effective health service. Within this complex and difficult context, the HaCIRIC researchers are trying to develop understanding,and provide tools and techniques that will help to resolve some of the inherent difficulties in the provision of the built environment for health care. The conference brought together people from all aspects of the health service, and provided some enlightening and informative moments for all of us.

A sense of purpose

Our vision for the School of Construction Management and Engineering (SCME) is to grow the strong multi-disciplinary research base underpinning aspects of construction management in which we have developed an internationally-leading reputation. The vocational disciplines around which our work is focused are not usually the focus of research funding in their own right and, therefore, on the face of it, our research and our teaching seem to be in different areas. That difference is more one of perception than reality. The professional institutions are acutely aware of the need for the professions to develop their respective bodies of knowledge. This extends beyond understanding what passes for best professional practice, to understanding the underlying sciences that can explain and challenge professional practice. In other words, the view in SCME is that the construction professions are not academic disciplines in their own right, but fields of application of theoretical frameworks and empirical research methods drawing widely from management, organization, law, economics, engineering, mathematical modelling, and so on. This is why we appoint academics who are specialists in diverse academic areas, with experience of the complexities of the construction sector. Each academic discipline brings a unique insight into the built environment, and the sector is strengthened as a result. It is this approach that makes SCME a world-class leader of the field. We want to continue to bring diverse academic disciplines to bear on the problems confronting the construction sector so that we can develop new ways of working, new approaches to complex problems, based upon robust and rigorous academic research that not only informs that practical world of construction internationally, but also contributes to the theory-building that helps the mainstream academic disciplines to deal with the complexities of the built environment. We seek to develop the professions in the UK and internationally by providing fundamental insights based on rigorous multi-disciplinary research.

Research Institute for the Built Environment

We established the Research Institute for the Built Environment as an alternative face for the School of Construction Management and Engineering, in order to help us to present our work to audience who might not usually look in our direction. The RIBE is becoming a forum for different kinds of work that take us into new directions and involvement with people we might not previously have come across. Jennifer Whyte, a Reader in Innovation and Design in the School, has organized a seminar series under the RIBE banner, in which external speakers are invited to address an audience of researchers, predominantly from the Innovative Construction Research Centre. Usually, we would get a paper from the speaker a week in advance of the event, and one of our colleagues will lead the discussion. Today, Prof Dick Boland was with us from the Department of Information Systems, Weatherhead School of Management, Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, Ohio, USA. It is always fascinating to go into some depth in a discussion, and particularly so when someone whose research has not been in construction turns their attention to the construction sector. Dick has done some very interesting work on the new building for his School that was designed by Frank Gehry. Although his background is in accounting, his research now emphasizes interpretive studies of how individuals design and use information systems. The way that he had applied this to an in-depth case study of a construction project was fascinating, but I won't write too much about it, because I just noticed on the draft paper that we were discussing was the text "please do not cite or circulate"! It was a draft, after all. Suffice to say, there were about 20 of us, most from SCME but some from the Informatics Research Centre, and we learned a lot by thinking about things from a very different perspective to usual. This is the great thing about these seminars.