How the Build Design Hub knowledge base is organised

Most construction questions arrive in the wrong shape. Someone asks "what insulation should I use?" when the real question is "what does this roof assembly need to do?", or asks about a system when what they actually need is a decision checklist.

The knowledge base is organised around five different kinds of answer, because those are five genuinely different questions. Recognising which one you are asking saves most of the searching.

Materials answer "what is this stuff?"

A material record describes a substance or product: what it is, what it is good at, where it fails, and what it is typically used with. Plasterboard, mineral wool, ready-mixed concrete, cement screed.

The important thing about a material record is what it deliberately does not say. It does not tell you whether that material is right for your wall, because that depends on the assembly, the exposure, the fire strategy, the acoustic requirement and the local regulations — none of which a material record can see.

Building systems answer "how does this go together?"

A system is an assembly: a warm deck flat roof, a raft foundation, a load-bearing masonry wall. It is a set of layers in an order, doing a job together that none of them does alone.

Systems are where most of the real difficulty in construction lives, and specifically at their interfaces — where the roof meets the wall, where the wall meets the ground, where the insulation layer meets a penetration. A system record exists because listing the materials in a roof tells you almost nothing about whether the roof works.

Guides answer "how do I approach this?"

A guide is process knowledge: how to plan a renovation, how to sequence a project, what happens in what order and why the order matters. Guides are the layer that turns a pile of correct facts into something you can act on.

Checklists answer "what have I not thought about?"

A checklist is deliberately not a guide. It does not explain; it enumerates. Its purpose is to catch the decision you did not know you were making — the utilities question you will regret not asking, the drawing review item everyone skips.

Checklists are the most under-used type, because they look trivial. They are the only type that is designed around the assumption that the reader is competent and busy, which describes most people on a construction project.

Ideas answer "what could this look like?"

Ideas are directional rather than technical: a palette, an interior direction, an outdoor scheme. They exist because a large share of building decisions start visually, and pretending otherwise just means people make those decisions somewhere with worse information.

Moving between them

The types are cross-linked because real questions cross between them. A reader who arrives at an interior direction usually needs a material next, then a system, then a checklist before they talk to anyone. That path is the actual shape of the work.

Why the split is worth the trouble

It would be simpler to write one long page per subject. It would also be wrong, because those five questions have different lifetimes. A material record changes when the material changes. A guide changes when good practice changes. An idea barely changes at all.

Collapsing them into one page means every one of those pages has to be revised whenever any of those things move — which in practice means none of them get revised, and the whole thing rots at the speed of its fastest-changing part.