You may or may not have heard of the Designing Buildings wiki. You may know it not by name but by its familiar look, or referenced it from web searches, or more recently it may have influenced an AI response to a construction enquiry you made.
As a brand, it stands out now as simple, perhaps traditional, within the range of media platforms that now exist, but it is a constant and openly updated resource. For just shy of 15 years, the Designing Buildings wiki has consistently provided totally free access to cross-disciplinary construction knowledge.
A worldwide web of sites trying to close themselves off from the impacts of AI means an increasingly difficult environment for professionals and students to gain a start in accessing comprehensive and reliable information. The wiki remains open and accessible to humans and machines alike, providing context to the continuum of updates and experiences needed to understand the current and professional landscape.
It requires a free login to create and edit content but not to view it. Its content is read worldwide, updated by thousands daily and remains true to its original intentions: to share construction knowledge from within the industry for the industry, for free.
The context for shared industry knowledge
In early 2000, following Latham’s “Constructing the Team” (1994) and Egan’s “Rethinking Construction” (1998), the core of the construction industry was under a microscope. Its adversarial nature, fragmentation, repetition of mistakes, and the need for improvements to achieve quality, cost, time, and safety were focus points.
At the same time, its launch article noted that the number of training days for consultants had been falling from 3.2 in 2004 to just 0.7 in 2011. Whilst neighbourhood planning and the push for self-build meant increasingly inexperienced but interested parties were encountering the industry, seeking an often-basic understanding as a start point.
Designing Buildings, the construction wiki, was launched in 2012 during a period of unprecedented change. A recession and government austerity measures put pressure on construction professionals to find 20% efficiencies and eliminate mistakes, highlighted by 25 major policy and legislative changes. The intention of the wiki, as a collaborative knowledge tool, was to facilitate better sharing across the industry and to give better access to knowledge. A platform set up by the industry, for the industry, to create, share, read, edit and comment on construction-specific content and ultimately learn from past mistakes and improve.
Sub-sector networked microsites
Shortly after Designing Buildings came into being, the Conservation wiki microsite was established to act as a conduit for the heritage sector. After a few years this was then followed gradually by the People, BIM, BREEAM, and Circular Economy wikis and AONB microsite, reflecting industry needs to the same effect. This formed a suite of interconnected, free-to-access themed sites responding to sector changes in context and representing key elements of the industry.
The forward-thinking design of the site meant that word cues would automatically create hyperlinks between articles across the whole platform, encouraging integration and creating an easy-to-navigate, cross-discipline, joined-up knowledge network, self-referenced and regularly updated.
Just five years later, one of the most significant events in UK construction history occurred, horrendously claiming the lives of 72 people and seriously and extensively exposing flaws across the entire industry. The years that directly followed the Grenfell Tower fire saw councils, committees and steering groups established to investigate culture change, improve industry competence, review existing buildings, and reassess processes relating to all buildings. Establishing buildings considered higher-risk, the Grenfell Inquiry went on to investigate, independently, how things had gone so very, very wrong.
During this time, many institutes instigated changes within their own organisations and fields, developing competence registers and building knowledge hubs to support members in keeping up with the rapid legislative and regulatory reform. However, this remained limited to professional boundaries rather than crossing these to join up and inform the industry as a whole.
The Building Safety wiki was established as a part of the Designing Buildings portfolio in 2024, a microsite developed in collaboration with LMC and Enframe Consulting, to create a single cross-discipline point of reference for everything to do with building safety in the UK. Its aim remains to facilitate a free-to-access starting point for the increasingly complex world of building safety, to support an integrated transparent response via a searchable cross-linked resource, and to share, track and access multi-discipline cross-discipline perspectives and knowledge sharing.
Supporting structured knowledge
Designing Buildings and its suite of microsites remain a constant in the volatile construction arena, continuing to compile, connect, carefully structure and share knowledge. Now with over 20,000 articles and the same number of users, it stands as a comprehensive, continuous compendium for broader perspectives of the changing industry which is our built environment.
It relies on support from UK institutions, who in return see their content exposed to a broader audience for longer, in turn helping build a repository of wider institutional knowledge, promoting members’ activities and integration. It also relies on some advertising and seeks further support from companies to develop specialist branded knowledge hubs. In a different way it relies on its ongoing users to create and share relevant content, from individual or practice expertise. It publishes regular current affairs, industry updates and biweekly newsletter via email and social media.
While times are challenging, the Designing Buildings brand and microsites understand that AI can only be as good as the information it is trained upon, and keeping track of context is the route to informed and shared knowledge. We continue to believe that the industry can only benefit from the sharing of structured knowledge. This principle is needed now as much as it ever was and may just help towards improvement, no matter via which channel that knowledge gets to its audience.
So why not take a look, create a free account and publish your experience as a professional or a future professional? You can promote your recent project or upcoming event or pose questions around the building safety regime, conservation, BIM, diversity or circular economy, sharing perspectives to encourage better knowledge transfer and more enlightened discussions toward industry improvement.