‘Design and build’ changed the rules by which design decisions are made, and the industry has yet to fully acknowledge the consequences. By Zacharias Fotos.
Discussion around design and build (D&B) usually focuses on risk transfer, cost and programme certainty.
Far less attention is paid to what happened to design leadership when responsibility for design development moved to contractor-led delivery organisations. Design may remain central to project outcomes, but the way design decisions are governed differs materially from more traditional arrangements.
Under traditional procurement routes, design development typically took place within design-led environments, often with the architect acting for the client and setting the conditions under which design work progressed.
Decisions were not necessarily better or more complete, but they were made in contexts friendly for exploration, iteration and gradual convergence. While imperfect, this structure broadly aligned decision-making authority with the exploratory nature of design.
“Design problems rarely resolve in a straight line – they require iteration, coordination and testing before they stabilise.”
Under D&B, that same responsibility sits within delivery environments shaped by programme certainty, commercial control and audit requirements.
These environments are highly effective at managing execution, but they are not meant to accommodate open-ended design thinking. Design development is therefore increasingly judged using delivery measures that favour early certainty over decision readiness.
This creates a familiar tension for design managers.
Design problems rarely resolve in a straight line – they require iteration, coordination and testing before they stabilise. Under delivery pressure, decisions are often fixed early, documentation usually becomes a proxy for progress, and revisiting design is labelled as rework rather than improvement. When changes emerge later, they are inadvertently treated as errors rather than evidence that decisions were never fully ready.
D&B changes design authority
Under D&B, the architect is often retained as lead consultant, implying continuity with the traditional role. In reality, while coordination responsibilities remain, authority over the timing of design freezes increasingly lies with delivery teams responding to programme and commercial pressures.
This is not a competence issue. Design managers working in D&B environments are highly capable and often come from architectural or engineering backgrounds.
The issue is structural. Design leadership now operates within delivery organisations and needs to be consciously redefined for that environment. This requires a clear governance model for design decisions, distinct from the management of design output.
As projects become more complex and regulated, this misalignment becomes harder to manage. The cost of fixing decisions too early increases, and design risk is pushed downstream.
In response, developers increasingly rely on repeatable design patterns to reduce project-level decisions, but when applied in isolation, these can introduce new interface risks rather than streamline design.
The answer is not a return to traditional procurement. D&B remains a highly effective commercial model, but design decision governance needs to evolve within its new home.
Treating design development as a delivery task is no longer adequate. What is missing is a clearer understanding of design management as a leadership discipline that shapes how design decisions are developed, tested and established before they are committed to delivery.
Zacharias Fotos MCIOB PMP ARB is senior technical coordinator at Mount Anvil.
