10043907The Performance of Time & Motion Studies on a Prototype Construction using the Educopod Construction SystemClosedGrant for R&DInnovate UK"Modernise or Die": this was the bleak call-to-arms issued by the Government's official Farmer Review into the productivity crisis in the construction sector. Productivity per worker has been stagnant for many years, whilst the construction workforce is rapidly ageing without being replaced and is therefore in steep decline. If we are to meet the construction needs of our society then we need to pursue at least one of two goals: firstly, to radically speed up the construction process, to enable a given construction workforce to build an increased number of buildings; secondly, to radically deskill the construction process, to widen the pool of the potential construction workforce. Our revolutionary, patent-pending and structural engineer-approved construction system aims at doing both --- and it is the goal of this project to test and quantify this. The project mainly focuses on two Time & Motion studies, one to examine each of these goals. The first study will involve a team of four experienced builders to use our system to perform a variety of assembly tasks as quickly as is safely feasible, finishing with the construction of an entire simple building. The data and recordings from this study will be used to ascertain best practices for assembly and to quantify the level of assembly speed that experienced builders can reasonably attain with our system. The second study will repeat the first, only with the benefit of what has been learnt from the first study and with completely unskilled assemblers with no construction experience. The data and recordings from this second study will be used to analyse performance gaps between the unskilled and skilled assemblers, with the intent of improving our training materials and thus expanding the potential for our system to expand the construction labour pool. The challenge of our times in the construction sector is to innovate ways to make construction faster and/or simpler, and our project aims to meet this challenge and experimentally prove it.