Loughborough University
Leicestershire, UK
LE11 3TU
+44 (0)1509 263171
Civil and Building Engineering
Dr Derek Thomson
FHEA, PhD, BSc (Hons)
Lecturer in Quantity Surveying
Background
Dr. Thomson specialises in issues of value and how it relates to, and is perceived in, the built environment. Originally a Quantity Surveyor, he rapidly realised that value has little to do with price or any other numerical representation. After finding this in client-side QS practice, he returned to academia to investigate value analysis and value management. While he remains impassioned about the insights these techniques can bring to investment effectiveness (and, others than Dr. Thomson would argue, improving value for money), he concluded that they have little to do with value in its truest sense.
This insight caused him to further study the nature of design itself and the affective consequences of the artefacts we create: not just in construction. This clarified his thoughts in the intractable relationship of value and the values of those perceiving it. On studying these philosophical principles of value further and, becoming dismayed by the shortcomings of the DQI and advocates of design patterns, he sought his own funding to delve further into these issues.
External Activities
Deputy Editor of Engineering, Construction and Architectural Management.
Research Interests
Dr. Thomson actively conducts research in the fields of value and value management, stakeholder engagement, and design evaluation.
In his most recent studies, he has worked towards embedding some of the values-centred, perceptual-based views of value that directly recognise it as an attribute of both an object and a subject; yet an attribute of neither alone. These are taking him further into practical applications of value functions, stated preference valuation methods (despite their attendant problems), and more-recently prospect theory.
Research Group
Construction Management
Current Research Activities
Optimising healthcare infrastructure value through enterprise and knowledge transfer activities: Dr. Thomson is a co-investigator on this EPSRC Knowledge Training Account which is developing insights into the healthcare estate developed from prior Loughborough University contributions to the Health and Care Infrastructure Research and Innovation Centre (HaCIRIC).
Previous Research Projects
As Researcher:
- Designing for Short Life: An EPSRC project that modelled the economic and environmental benefits of modelling the whole life value of building services components recognising their long physical and financial life rather than their short functional life. This work established the process and economic parameters required for component remanufacture and reuse.
- Integrated Collaborative Design: A large EPSRC project that, among other things, sought to help design engineers become more aware of value in their work and to consider the use of insightful problem solving techniques that could overcome the “good enough is best” problem that is endemic in the construction sector.
- Research Engineer for AMEC Capital Projects: A twelve month EPSRC RAIS placement with AMEC saw Dr. Thomson working alongside design engineers to help them adopt these new problem solving techniques.
- Managing Value Delivery in Design: A high-profile EPSRC project that developed new theory and a practical framework to help construction designers and operators engage stakeholders in the articulation and evaluation of value. This work solved the challenging problem of structuring the expression of the intangible notion of value in a tangible, workable way. It produced the “Value in Design (VALiD)” approach to addressing the value sought by stakeholders from construction projects in a practical way. This relates the benefits that stakeholders seek from projects to the benefits they are willing to make to gain those benefits, and the resources they will consume in bringing about that change. This framework introduces fundamental philosophical insights into the value agenda debate and provided a way to move beyond the superficiality of prescriptive techniques such as the Design Quality Indicator.
As Investigator:
- Concrete2Cookers: Dr. Thomson was co-investigator on this EPSRC public engagement project that embedded the building energy performance models developed by the Energy Academy of Heriot-Watt University into an educational game for local schools (late primary and early secondary levels) comprising an online exploratory game and supporting classroom materials.
- Process Toolkit for Co-location of Further and Higher Education Institutions: Dr. Thomson was a co-investigator on this project for the Scottish Funding Council which performed a longitudinal, ethnographic study of the colocation of a higher education and a further education organisation. Although centred around a single physical site, this work embraced all functions of organisational function with particular emphasis on legal governance of the framework agreements required to structure such colocation. When combined with investigation of the opinions of the wider community of educational estate managers, a ‘best’ practice process model was produced together with supporting guidance. This was adopted by the Scottish Funding Council and must now be followed by all funded projects of this type.
- The Benefits Quantification Method: Dr. Thomson was co-investigator on this project to developing a practical approach to measuring project performance in “realising” (i.e. bringing about) the benefits sought from investments in buildings. As the benefits that stakeholders seek from investments are often intangible in nature, this work addressed particular challenges in helping them to translate their amorphous values into slightly-more tangible sought benefits, and to then translate these benefits into the qualities of buildings that, if present, would be considered the evidence of benefit realisation. This work was performed for HaCIRIC and, while it can be used by itself, it is intended to inform a benefits realisation management process such as those mandated by the Government’s ‘Managing Successful Programmes‘ approach.
