EOS optioneering – turning the established design process on its head
Christian Bocci
Christian is a Senior Partner who designs and delivers challenging projects for our clients. He also plays a key role in client relationship building and business development within the practice.
21 Nov 2017
EOS is a two stage optioneering process conceived by WW+P to improve the outcomes in designing complex projects. It has been successfully used on 30 projects over a 10 year period, most recently on the whole line of route of Crossrail 2.
The process has been developed to help both the design team and the client/ wider stakeholder team create projects where the best fit and best value design is not obvious. It has predominantly been used to bring together infrastructure projects with commercial building opportunities - a transit oriented development (TOD) approach.
The EOS optioneering process has received very positive endorsement from our client organisations and was instrumental in WW+P’s recent shortlisting for transport consultant of the year, up against consultant giants Steer Davies Gleeve and Atkins.
The process is two stage and involves a sift process to optimise design proposals against requirements – creating a design audit, exhaustively exploring options and showing a clear path to the best fit scheme. The process works to DfT Green book major projects criteria in justifying an optimised scheme and prepares projects for successful submission for Transport Works Act Order (TWAO) or similar. So far it has been used on Rail/development schemes but Senior Partner Christian Bocci is certain it can be used on many other complex infrastructure projects to achieve measurable improvements in both programme, design output and speed to arrive at a SPO (single preferred option). These other sectors would include airport design, retail design and masterplanning.
The EOS process is a collaborative one, bottom up in its assembly of parts and involves both the client and design team in the design process so all parties have control and input to the final outcome, engendering collective ownership to the design. It is exciting and engaging to be involved in the process and generates high interest on projects, one of our recent workshops had over 50 attendees.
The EOS process turns many established conventional ways of design on their head, it is innovative in its conception and the track record is extensive enough to consider its flexibility and benefits, having had projects now built designed under the process and its growing take up in application. The process still involves the core design skills of crafting solutions, idea brainstorming and simple clear concepts but this is added to and structured by using EOS.
Christian now envisages the process being developed as a web interactive application and this will enable consultation to go from current workshops of up to 50 to say a 200 person input, allowing collaboration worldwide and potentially being used a public open consultation design tool.
Christian Bocci
Christian is a Senior Partner who designs and delivers challenging projects for our clients. He also plays a key role in client relationship building and business development within the practice.