Compliance & standards
What is a design brief?
A design brief is the statement of what a scaffold has to do, issued to the designer before the design is produced. It records the loads, the dimensions, the constraints and the duration.
The design brief is a BS 5975 step, normally prepared by the temporary works coordinator and handed to the designer. A design is only as good as what it was asked for, and the brief is where the requirements are captured: what the scaffold is for, what it must carry, how long it will stand, what it can and cannot be tied to, and what is in the way.
It matters commercially as well as technically. A design produced against a brief that missed a requirement will need redoing, and the argument about who pays turns on what the brief said.
Briefs are frequently verbal, which is the root of most of the trouble. The information exists — somebody knew the crane was coming in June — it just never reached the person doing the design.
What goes wrong on site
- Constraints known on site and never written into the brief.
- A brief that states dimensions but not duration, so a temporary structure is designed for a short-term exposure it then exceeds.
- Changes to the requirement communicated after the design was issued, without the brief being updated.