Published: 8th November 2017
What’s driving change in the way housing is being designed in the UK? And how are these factors impacting on the way housing looks and performs for its residents?
These are questions that leading manufacturer and supplier of PVC windows, doors and fascia systems, Epwin Group, has asked the UK’s architects and specifiers.
Epwin Group, which includes leading brands such as Profile 22, Swish and Spectus, has undertaken a research project to find out how housing has changed over recent years and assess what factors will drive change in the near future.
Epwin’s Marketing Director, Sharn Samra, explains; “As a business we’ve placed a real focus on product innovation and meeting the ever-evolving needs of our market and customers.
“Keeping one eye on the future has helped us to become the successful business we are today, and we are always looking for ways that we can learn more about the market and meeting our customer’s needs.
“As such, it’s important to us that we’re not only looking to the future and understanding trends that are affecting design, but also evaluating the impact of these trends on the built environment.
“Our research project, Building for the Future, addresses these very questions.
“Building for the Future gets under the skin of what is driving change in the built environment, by asking the very people who have the most influence on it – architects and specifiers.
“We carried out a survey which first examined where we’ve come from; how has the design of housing changed over the last decade, and why? It then asked this group about what factors they feel will affect housing over the next decade and what affect they will have on the way it is designed and built.
“We combined the results of the survey with in-depth interviews and desktop research and the results are fascinating. Furthermore, the feedback that we’ve received is that this research has been conducted at a pertinent time; many architects feel that we are currently seeing many influential, yet conflicting, factors converging simultaneously.
“These factors will present significant challenges for the design community, and we got a real sense that they are concerned about how they will meet the task that lies ahead – designing homes which will meet the needs of our changing population, framed against issues such as increasing urban populations and a lack of available land for development.
“These are issues that will inevitably affect the way that housing is designed and built in the future, and not in 50 years’ time, but now.
“We feel that Building for the Future offers a fascinating insight into the changing face of our built environment and we really hope that you enjoy it.”
The Epwin Group Building for the Future research project will be available online from late November. For updates on the research please register your interest at buildingforthefuture.epwin.co.uk.
Information on the research will also be published on Epwin Group’s twitter feed @EpwinGroup
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