ONE wins Midlands Innovation Award

Posted: 9 June 2021

ONE Creative environments (ONE) was awarded the Midlands Innovation of the Year Award at the Midlands Business Awards on Friday (4 June 2021).

ONE, which is a multi-disciplinary design company with a Midlands HQ (Worcester) and offices in Birmingham and London, won the category due to their innovation in digital construction and R&D work relating to Building Information Modelling (BIM).

BIM is a powerful tool and provides a means of creating and managing virtually every aspect of a building’s design and engineering in a three-dimensional model with attributed data, which can be shared by multiple authorised users.

The award recognises ONE’s work with Multiplex to develop the Virtual Mockup using BIM. This innovation addresses challenges faced by the industry as it is common on high profile, large scale residential projects for the construction team to provide full-scale, off-site mockups of key apartment types to allow the design and client team to inspect quality and for the construction team to resolve coordination issues ahead of the construction process. Physical mockups, however, can be very costly (typically over £1 million), take months to build and require multiple alterations and iterations to resolve coordination issues (creating wastage) while the construction programme advances.

The Virtual Mockup brings all of the benefits of a physical mockup (and more) but it is a hugely efficient process at about 5% of the cost with much less material waste – crucial in the climate emergency.

Jason Whittall, Director of BIM at ONE, said: “We are so pleased to win this award as it recognises our R&D work and the investments we are making in digital construction.”

“As a company we pride ourselves on creativity and innovation to find the best and most efficient solutions for our clients and it is fantastic that this has been recognised at these prestigious awards.”

“The Virtual Mockup has already proved itself to be invaluable on many projects and I am pleased to say we are now able to offer this service to all of our clients. Congratulations to everyone shortlisted and the award winners.”

ONE is a company that is well known for innovation and has previously won the Innovation category at both the Constructing Excellence West Midlands 2020 awards and Business Desk’s 2019 West Midlands Business Masters awards, Project Innovation of the Year award at Digital Construction Week 2018 and the RICS Award for Design Through Innovation in 2017. Other recent related award wins include: the Digital Construction award at Constructing Excellence West Midlands 2020 awards and Designer of the Year at BIM Show Live 2019.

Further details about the Midlands Business Awards can be found here.