Our co-founder Juriaan van Meel gave a lecture about construction briefing at Leuven University, on their post-graduate course on real estate. He discussed the purpose of briefing, the relation between briefing and design, and different kinds of briefs (the strategic, functional and technical brief).
He ended his presentation with this cartoon about client behaviour. The source of the cartoon is unclear unfortunately (anyone?) but it very well illustrates the importance of being a ‘good’ construction client. As Juriaan explained in his lecture, this means, amongst other things, that you are clear about what you want from a project. What are your ambitions on matters such as sustainability and architectural expression? What are you functional needs and requirements? What are must-have’s and nice-to-have’s? Simple questions, but often not properly answered.
That said, Juriaan also pointed out that it is just as important that design teams take the brief seriously. When provided with a brief, they should make a careful ‘requirement analysis’, flag requirements that are unclear, come up with suggestions for improvement, and discuss these with the client—thereby creating shared understanding of the project’s scope, ambitions and possibilities.
More info about the course can be found here.