TVD Tower

The Construction department at Texas A&M teaches Target Value Design through a game in which students build a tower to support a marshmallow. This multiplayer digitization of the physical game was made with Unity, and a VR version was in development at the time I left the university.

Background

The goal of Target Value Design (TVD) is to reduce the overall cost of a project by encouraging collaboration between the client and the designers in the planning stages, as opposed to the traditional Design-Bid-Build (DBB) process of construction planning (similar to Agile vs. Waterfall in the tech world). The latter consists of a client offering a project and receiving bids of work from several potential construction companies. The fact that communication between the client and designers is limited during the design process makes it difficult to suggest alternatives to the listed requirements that might still meet the client's needs. This can lead to a design process in which the cost is largely an afterthought during the bulk of planning, and is only considered when looking for opportunities to trim down the final design. TVD instead starts with consideration of cost by analyzing the Market Cost of similar projects, and the maximum Allowable Cost for which the project will be financially viable to the client. A Target Cost for the project is set below this Allowable Cost as a desirable (and possibly incentivized) goal, though not one critical to delivery of the project. This encourages cost to inform design decisions rather than merely be a result of those decisions. It also requires collaboration between the client and designers in order to clearly communicate expectations and facilitate iteration of ideas to converge on a Target-Cost final design.

To illustrate these differences, the game is played in two rounds. During the first round, participants construct a tower from household items to hold a marshmallow two feet in the air. After doing so, each item material is assigned a cost, which is used to calculate the total cost of the tower. This total cost is used as the baseline Market Cost for the following round, in which players must construct a new tower with the knowledge of material costs. The Allowable Cost for the second round is set at 80% of the Market Cost, and the players' new tower must not exceed this value. Anything below this value is considered acceptable, though players will also set a Target Cost below this value as a goal for the second round. This process allows players to experience the difference made by starting the design process with the TVD perspective of planning according to cost.