Engineering and infrastructure advisory firm Aurecon global director Dr Kourosh Kayvani appointed eight design directors to the firm last month in a move to continue increasing the company’s investment in design to gain a competitive advantage.
As the world becomes increasingly complex, ambiguous and volatile, creative and innovative design needs to underpin engineering and engineered solutions, he says.
“Design is more than having an understanding of technical specifications and applying these to deliver new infrastructure. Great design is about coming to a challenge without preconceived ideas or rigid sets of rules. It is about imagining what can be and then creating solutions to deliver great outcomes for clients and stakeholders.”
Kayvani notes that, in recent years, design in the engineering sector has been focused on “conventional systems and narrowly defined functional elements, rather than exploring holistic options and incubating innovation to create unique design solutions”.
Computing and robotics are disrupting professional services companies in the same way that they have disrupted blue collar businesses. For engineers and infrastructure advisers, this disruption comes in many forms, and Aurecon’s response is multifaceted, including a focus on innovation, and digital and design thinking.
“Aurecon’s design directors are leading practitioners, representing the pinnacle of technical mastery in our company. . . these experts will focus on problem finding and solving for our clients and will explore the essence of great design, just as the best design engineers did in the past,” Kayvani asserts.
He adds that Aurecon aims to deliver meaningful design solutions to help clients navigate through uncertainty. To achieve this, it is important to acknowledge the significance of human attributes, such as observation and creativity, as well as a deep understanding of and empathy with stakeholders’ desires and needs, Kayvani says.
“Building strong, design-focused relationships with our clients means empowering our best designers and allowing them to imagine and connect deeply with projects. Our creative objective is to conceptualise, provoke, refine, plan and deliver excellence across the life cycle of clients’ projects.”
Aurecon global CEO Giam Swiegers states that the company’s design directors offer clients a means through which they can ask questions to understand change and partner with the company to deliver projects.