Compliance & standards
What is a bespoke design?
A bespoke design is a scaffold design produced by a competent designer for a structure that falls outside published guidance. It comprises calculations and drawings for that specific scaffold.
Where a configuration cannot be covered by a compliance sheet, it needs designing. That is the work of a person with the relevant engineering competence, and it results in calculations and drawings specific to the structure rather than a confirmation that it matches something already assessed.
Software does not replace that person. What software can usefully do is make the boundary visible early — flagging that a requested configuration falls outside a compliance sheet while the job is still being planned, rather than when the squad is standing on site with the wrong kit on the wagon.
A bespoke design is only useful if the people inspecting and adapting the scaffold can find it. Held against the structure, it tells an inspector what the scaffold was supposed to be; filed by job number in a folder, it is evidence nobody consults.
What goes wrong on site
- A structure built to a design nobody on site has seen.
- Adaptations made to a bespoke-designed scaffold without going back to the designer.
- Assuming a modelling tool has produced a design because it produced a drawing.