Economic quality design

Key decisions in the development of a project affecting cost and quality need to be taken in the very early stages of the design process to achieve the best value. It is therefore important to make the correct strategic decisions in the early stages, as it becomes increasingly expensive and unrealistic to make changes as design proceeds. The aim of this research is to produce a reliable strategy, for use at an early stage of the design process, which enables the evaluation of a proper balance between cost and quality, in order to achieve best value. The definition of quality is complex. Quality in building design will embrace all the aspects by which a building is judged, all the meanings and associations attached by people to places, the aesthetic qualities assigned by people to their surroundings. Hampshire County Council Primary Schools are used as an example for data collection and analysis. These schools were selected as the County’s policy is the achievement of a positive balance between quality and cost. The schools are regarded as excellent, in a quality scale of poor to excellent, by users, the public and construction professionals alike. The study enabled us to identify design quality patterns and to get a better understanding of how qualitative and quantitative criteria relate and the extent to which quality and cost are related to each other.