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Decisions made during the design stage of construction works can significantly reduce the risk of occurrence of occupational accidents, injuries and illnesses. Moreover, it has been established that design is one of the major contributors of accidents and injuries. Design for safety (DfS) studies within construction have highlighted factors affecting the implementation of DfS, among which are designer attitude; DfS knowledge/awareness and education; availability of DfS tools, including guidance; client’s influence and motivation; and legislation. The purpose of this study is to carry out an in-depth literature review of DfS studies within construction to explore the extent to which existing DfS research has looked at the above-listed DfS implementation factors.

A review of 164 journal articles related to DfS in construction (published from 1990 to 2017) within built environment, engineering and multidisciplinary safety journals was undertaken.

The findings indicate that around 60 per cent of the journal articles reviewed address designer knowledge/awareness and education issues, about 27 per cent looked at DfS implementation tools to assist designers to undertake DfS, about 23 per cent studied client influence/motivation, about 16 per cent studied designers’ attitudes towards DfS implementation and approximately 16 per cent looked at the role of legislation in DfS implementation. The literature points that client influence/motivation and legislation are very influential DfS implementation factors despite a limited number of studies in these areas.

Overall, the findings provide an indication of areas of DfS implementation, particularly client influence/motivation and legislation, where more research would be needed to promote DfS in construction to help mitigate the occurrence of accidents and injuries.

This study aims to design and validate a decision support system (DSS), named preliminary risk assessment of brownfield sites (PRABS). It is intended that the proposed DSS will aid the identification of potential hazards and, in doing so, highlight challenges facing those stakeholders dealing with the decision-making on brownfield site redevelopments, where the examples of diverse stakeholders would include, for instance, risk assessors, local planning authorities, regulator, developers, civil engineers, architectures, landowners, investors and alike. Moreover, the DSS will enable them to promote safer redevelopment and minimise the risks to future occupants of brownfield sites and neighbouring lands, on the top of the tool being communal platform of an effective communication between them as it is for both experts and non-experts.

This research employs a comprehensive five-stage process, integrating both quantitative and qualitative methods and utilizing mixed methods for a nuanced exploration of data. The initial stage involves an in-depth examination of contemporary risk assessment tools for contaminated sites, setting the foundation and benchmarks for subsequent stages. Stage two focuses on creating a conceptual framework using insights from existing literature to guide the development of the DSS tool. Stage three introduces a validation mechanism through a questionnaire administered to experts. Stage four involves the active development of the DSS tool, transforming theoretical constructs into a practical application. The final stage, stage five, employs quantitative data analysis and case studies to validate, refine and enhance the DSS tool’s applicability in real-world scenarios, ensuring its approval.

This study presents PRABS, a user-friendly DSS for the PRABS. Validation through a quantitative online survey indicates strong support for PRABS, with around 80% of participants willing to recommend it due to its ease of use and information quality. Qualitative data analysis using real-life case studies further demonstrates the tool’s effectiveness. PRABS proves valuable in identifying hazards during the preliminary stage, accurately predicting potential contaminants despite limited input data in the case studies. The tool’s hazard identification aligns well with expert judgments and case study reports, confirming its practical utility.

This study has several limitations. First, the DSS identifies only hazards associated with one layer of site geology, even though sites may include multiple layers, which limits the comprehensiveness of the hazard identification process. Second, adopting an online survey approach posed challenges in achieving a high response rate and gathering a representative sample, making it uncertain how the results might vary with a higher number of professional participants. This limitation affects the generalisability of the findings. Finally, while this study identified 65 potential hazards associated with brownfield sites, this number could be expanded to include hazards related to plants, animals and air, indicating the need for a more inclusive approach to hazard identification. Given these limitations, future research should focus on addressing these gaps.

The contributions of this study offer practical benefits. Firstly, it enables the initial risk assessment process to be more comprehensive and integrated and reduces complexity in the risk assessment process by ensuring that all probabilities, along with their significance, are identified at the initial stage of the risk assessment. This could be a strong starting point for successfully conducting a more detailed risk assessment and remediation. Secondly, the developed PRABS can promote effective environmental communication among stakeholders, which should speed up the planning process and help develop brownfield sites more efficiently and effectively, while preserving the natural environment.

The Furniture, Fixture and Equipment (FFE) sector is well placed to leverage virtual reality (VR) technology for competitive and operational advantages; however, the diffusion of VR applications in this sector has followed a steep curve. This study reports on the implementation of two novel VR applications in the FFE sector and also investigates the challenges and benefits associated with their use and adaptability.

A sequential exploratory mixed research methodology consisting of three phases was adopted for this study. This included identification of factors that affect/facilitate the implementation of VR (Challenges and Benefits) using experiments during in-house prototyping of VR applications, a rigorous literature review and questionnaire survey to solicit FFE Stakeholder's (n = 117) opinion on the utility and usefulness of the proposed applications and to the understand factors that facilitate and inhibit their implementation in FFE's context, particularly as a design communication and coordination tool.

The findings of this study revealed that distributed and single-user VR has become essential to digitalising the FFE sector's design communication with improved design communication being regarded as the most important benefit of its use. Conversely, the most critical challenge that inhibits the implementation of these two VR applications in the FFE sector is the perceived cost.

This study provides valuable insight to FFE's stakeholders to devise action plans to mitigate myriad complex and interrelated factors that affect the adoption of virtual reality technology in the FFE sector that are otherwise very hard to understand, and the consequential implementation of any mitigation plans cannot be devised.

This study aims to propose a novel approach to developing an interactive and immersive virtual environment for design communication in the furniture, fixture and equipment (FFE) sector. The study further investigates its effectiveness in enhancing the design communication and coordination between the stakeholder.

Quasi-experimental research was adopted involving 12 FFE professionals, designers and end-users in single-group pre-test-post-test design. The tests were performed primarily to ascertain the impact of the application of interactive virtual reality on delivering furniture design selection and coordination tasks. Further interviews were used to elicit participants' views on the functionality and usefulness of the proposed approach.

The findings indicate that an interactive immersive virtual FFE environment: enhances the productivity of the design team through a collaborative virtual workspace offering a synchronised networked design testing and review platform; reduces the time required for the stakeholders to comprehend the design options and test those; enhances the design communication and quality of the design and encourages the collaborative culture in the industry; improves the design satisfaction of the stakeholders; and finally, requires significantly less time for design decision-making when compared to traditional methods.

Future studies should incorporate space planning concepts and explore non-experimental methodologies in a real-life FFE project setup.

The proposed approach provides opportunities for enhanced interpretation of design intent in FFE as well as efficiency in design selection and coordination tasks when compared with conventional two-dimensional methods of communication.

This study proposes a step change in the way furniture design is communicated and coordinated through an immersive virtual experience. Previous studies have not addressed the issue of impact on design coordination instead focussed on marketing and sales.

The emergence of building information modelling (BIM) has led to the need for pre-qualification and selection of organisations capable of working within a BIM environment. Several criteria have been proposed for the assessment of an organisation’s BIM capability during the pre-qualification and selection phase of projects. However, no studies have sought to empirically establish whether organisations selected on the basis of such criteria have actually been the most successful at delivering BIM on projects. The purpose of this paper is to address the aforementioned gap through a comparison of predicted BIM capability and post-selection performance.

BIM capability of firms in a case study was predicted using 28 BIM pre-qualification and selection criteria, prioritised based on their perceived contribution to BIM delivery success from a survey of practitioners on BIM-enabled projects. The comparison of predicted BIM capability and post-selection performance was, on the other hand, achieved through the application of the Technique to Order Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution and fuzzy sets theory (Fuzzy-TOPSIS).

Findings underscore the reliability of the 28 BIM pre-qualification and selection criteria as well as the priority weightings proposed for their use in predicting BIM capability and likelihood of performance. The findings have highlighted the importance of criteria related as previous BIM use experience as well as information processing maturity as critical indicators of the capability of organisations, particularly design firms.

Overall, the findings highlight the need for prioritisation of BIM pre-qualification and selection criteria on the basis of their actual contribution to delivery success from post-selection evaluation of performance.

Poor performance remains a challenge for the construction industry worldwide. One of the key performance indicators of the construction industry is the timely delivery of projects. Despite the recent methodological and technological advances in the field, project-overrun remains a significant challenge for the industry. This paper seeks to propose practical solutions that allow overcoming the challenges and promote the opportunities for improving the performance of the construction projects in Dubai.

This study focussed on the construction projects in Dubai; therefore, this research adopted a sequential mixed approach in two stages. The first stage involved face-to-face interviews with seven carefully selected construction professionals. Their answers were analysed to provide with the literature study “the informed-basis for the development of the online questionnaire”. The second stage involved an online survey administrated to 425 carefully selected construction organisations working in Dubai. Accordingly, a meticulous analysis for the prime causes of project overruns has also been undertaken. This analysis assisted proposing the most suitable solutions-based technologies that enabled alleviating overruns in the construction projects.

The findings revealed that, there was a consensus agreement on the formidable opportunities for improving the performance of the construction industry in general and in particular in Dubai. These opportunities are intrinsically linked with the adoption of the latest technologies such as building information modelling, augmented reality, virtual reality and the artificial intelligence (AI). Whereas, adopting AI has already assisted two public authorities to release No Objection Certificates and work permits effectively within one day instead of 14 working days, which has saved 90% of the time and cost. Likewise, adoption of the AI has assisted delivering the construction project with a 9% of time saving and a 6% of cost saving due to embracing an automated system that enabled them to instantly detect and report the delays, once occurred.

The main limitation of this study is that the study was limited to the construction industry in the Emirate of Dubai. Therefore, future research could target the whole United Arab Emirates construction industry to propose the practical solution on the country level.

The literature study is replete with solutions, which tend to be theoretical more than practical. Therefore, the proposed practical recommendations will significantly assist the construction industry to improve its suboptimal performance to rescind the sovereignty of the irrelevant involvements. The research recommended establishing independent entity to lead the change in the construction industry; this entity will have the power of enacting rules and legislations. Furthermore, this independent entity will have the power and authority of dictations and impose sanctions on the non-committed organisations that are reluctant to adopt the recommended technologies and approaches.

Based on the findings of the study, this paper draws a road map for the construction industry by determining practical solutions for improvements starting with an establishment of an independent authority that selects and tests the most appropriate technologies and approaches to contribute to performance improvements.

Against the backdrop of the contribution of design to the occurrence of occupational injuries and illnesses in construction, design for occupational safety and health (DfOSH) is increasingly becoming prominent in the construction sector. To ensure that design interventions are safe for construction workers to build and maintain, design firms need to have the appropriate organisational capability in respect of DfOSH. However, empirical insight regarding the attributes that constitute DfOSH organisational capability is lacking. The purpose of this paper, which trailblases the subject of DfOSH organisational capability in construction, is to address two key questions: what organisational attributes determine DfOSH capability? What is the relative priority of the capability attributes?

The study employed three iterations of expert focus group discussion and a subsequent three-round Delphi technique accompanied by the application of voting analytic hierarchy process.

The study revealed 18 capability attributes nested within six categories, namely: competence (the competence of organisation’s design staff); strategy (the consideration of DfOSH in organisation’s vision as well as the top management commitment); corporate experience (organisation’s experience in implementing DfOSH on projects); systems (systems, processes and procedures required for implementing DfOSH); infrastructure (physical, and information and communication technology resources); and collaboration (inter- and intra-organisational collaboration to implement DfOSH on projects). Whilst these categories and their nested attributes carry varying weights of importance, collectively, the competence-related attributes are the most important, followed by strategy.

The findings should enable design firms and other key industry stakeholders (such as the clients who appoint them) to understand designers’ DfOSH capability better. Additionally, design firms should be able to prioritise efforts/investment to enhance their DfOSH capability.

In spite of emerging research on building information modelling (BIM) capability assessment, there is a general dearth of knowledge about the links between often pre-emptive capability measurement attributes and actual delivery success. More so, current studies have not considered success from the wider construction supply chain (CSC) perspective. So far, the perceived importance of capability metrics is not based on post-project evaluations of their contribution to BIM delivery success. This paper aims to identify relevant BIM capability attributes used for qualifying CSC organisations for projects and further aims to investigate their relative importance and influence on some key aspects of BIM delivery success.

Based on heretofore validated set of BIM capability attributes from semi-structured interviews and a Delphi study, a survey of CSC firms on BIM-enabled projects was used to model the influence of BIM capability attributes on BIM delivery success. Multiple regression modelling was performed to ascertain the nature of the relationship between BIM capability attributes and the key aspects of BIM delivery success as identified from the literature.

BIM staff experience and the suitability of proposed methodology prior to project commencement were identified as the most influential on BIM delivery quality, as well as delivery within schedule and on budget. Conversely, the administrative and strategic-level capacities were found as the most influential in leveraging collaboration, coordination or integration of the CSC on projects through BIM.

This study provides a step change in prioritising BIM capability criteria based on evidence of their contribution to delivery success in key performance areas, rather than their perceived importance as capability metrics as widely practised.

The purpose of the paper is to report research conducted to explore the insights of UK architects on the Code for Sustainable Homes (CSH) in relation to low carbon housing design and delivery.

To explore the awareness and knowledge of CSH in low carbon housing design and delivery in the UK, a mixed method approach comprising of interviews with architects in practice and academia were combined with questionnaires to UK sustainable architectural practices.

The results confirmed that, although UK architects are aware of CSH, it is only very few (11.8 per cent), who have the expert knowledge. This is in comparison to 52.9 per cent of those with some knowledge, and 35.3 per cent of those who are very knowledgeable in the use and implementation of CSH to design and deliver low carbon new homes in the UK.

The findings of this study are based only on the sustainable architects in the UK, therefore the findings may not represent the view of other constructional professionals in the UK.

The research focused on investigating the judging criteria and opinions of architects who are strongly identified with sustainable housing design practices in the UK. It explores the insights of architects on the CSH, because their knowledge, use and implementation of it, along with other information on low carbon housing design, from the onset determines how soon zero carbon homes in the UK can be achieved; leading towards tackling energy use in the UK and on a wider level, the European commitment reduction of energy consumption.

The paper is able to expose the weakness of architects in the use of information that is not represented graphically, pictorially or in the recognised Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) plan of work stages familiar to architects and the general construction industry in the UK.