The benefits of this new way of working warrant the risk, and there is a risk when suggesting something new and different.
Exploring the MMC toolkit: from offsite construction to PPVC and beyond.MMC is the collective term for the innovative construction methods that can be deployed by the DfMA designer.
MMC can be considered as the DfMA designer’s “toolkit”.The DfMA designer finds the most suitable innovations in the MMC toolkit (or develops new innovations) to meet a project’s unique challenges..There are many construction innovations that can be considered MMC.
The UK’s Ministry for Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG) recently established a Joint Industry Working Group on MMC which proposed the following categorisation: 3D primary structural systems, 2D primary structural systems, Non-system components, Additive Manufacturing, Assemblies and sub-assemblies, Material and Product Innovations and Site Process Innovations.This categorisation is quite diverse and includes a range of pre-manufactured and pre-assembled systems but also non-system components, site-based material innovations and process innovations..
There is no fixed list of MMC methods in each category.
There is great scope for the construction industry to innovate and develop new MMC methods to expand the toolkit and enhance the DfMA designer’s ability to achieve benefits on future construction projects..And that includes solving the parts that are not worth automating or that are hardest to automate.
There are very obvious ethical dimensions here too, about automating humans out of work – or, conversely, about automating the function of humans within working environments.. We’re not charging headlong into some dystopic future.But we need to be aware that technology is not in a vacuum.
As we’ve said, it should come with ethics attached.. We would say that we’re using design automation to make digital tools and technology that provide ‘intelligent control’.3. in design, and allow people to be creative and practical.. That feels liberating to us.. 3.
(Editor: High-End TVs)