How a lawn mower inspired my design perspective

Earlier this month, I made a short LinkedIn post about designing safe and accessible maintenance on the roundabout outside our office. It’s always been a bit of an annoyance of mine when I see infrastructure falling short of adequately allowing for maintenance activities.

As a disclaimer, I’m not an arbiter of this. I’ve been guilty of getting caught up in the excitement of new design. But I did get taught an important lesson in my early years as a civil engineer.

Fifteen years ago, I was working as a trainee technician on A66 Newport Roundabout Improvements. There was a small area at the bottom of an embankment with palisade fencing for business premises. I remember sitting in my office, completely detached from any ‘on the ground’ experience, drawing the hatching and boundaries in CAD to fill a narrowing gap as it tapered to a point. It was to be grassed/seeded. That was my mandate. I thought absolutely nothing of tapering it away to a point. It was just lines and colours on a screen, but the boss quickly educated me about my impact on future maintenance activities and made me ask questions such as…

• How would that area be accessed safely?
• How would the grass be cut and maintained?
• How could the nearby fence and property boundary be protected?

Essentially, it came down to the physical gap a maintenance operative could fit a lawnmower in. I hadn’t even considered a real person going down there into that gap. But they would need to. My next question, and I know you’re all thinking it, what kind of lawnmower was it? How much space do they need? Will those maintaining it have access to a simple handheld lawn mower? Would it be petrol or electric, would it be a ride-on? Who knows!

Would it matter? Well, yes, potentially. But so long as you’ve thought about it, considered the activity, and come up with a workable and logical solution, then you’re in the right mindset. A ridiculously simple example. But that was it – I’d learned the importance of designing for maintenance on something so small that would have a profound impact on the rest of my career. I remember the solution we decided on was to stop the grass when it got to a pinch point of 1.0 m wide. Therefore, we knew that the maintenance activity of grass cutting would be able to go ahead without any issues.

It's a simple lesson but one that has never left me in 15 years of working.