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Posted: Monday, April 12, 2010
By: Steve Willis, a professional urban and environmental Planner, Vice President of Planning and Sustainable Communities with MMM Group Limited. |
Most people understand the “why” of Sustainability even if they are not actually sure about the “what”. The biggest conundrum of all is “how”.
Public opinion polling tells the story that most Canadians are concerned about the impacts of climate change, depleting supplies of natural resources, decline or loss of certain species. Even more people increasingly fear the health risks of pollution and toxins in our water, land and air. For others, rapid spikes in energy prices cause them to take conservation quite seriously.
Regardless of personal motives, the core idea of sustainability is that our generation needs to strive to meet its own needs without depriving our children and future generations of the ability to meet theirs.
The challenge today is how to build our homes, our infrastructure and our communities in the most sustainable way possible. The “low hanging fruit” today involves avoiding building in sensitive natural areas, and installing more energy and water efficient fixtures and appliances in new homes.
To move to the next level, we need a much more deliberate approach. Our buildings and site developments must be considered carefully as living systems in themselves. Our homes and offices draw energy and are part of the water cycle. Significant reductions in resource use and address reducing toxicity are possible through Integrated Design.
Integrated Design sounds complicated and costly, but it is simply bringing designers, planners, engineers, and systems specialists together to look at the interconnections between site design, building design, and city systems to study interconnections to find “savings” that accomplish multiple goals. The savings could be further reductions in energy use, water use, materials for construction, waste, or low toxicity building components.
Successful Integrated Design needs a committed project champion, a client who wants to spend the time to explore ideas to improve their project. They also need to balance that with clear design intent, and a willingness to drive the team to measurable objectives and outcomes.
The most successful sustainable projects focus their investment in a few key strategies. This economizes on where design enhancements can lead to the greatest impact. This goes back to clear design intent and clear objectives.
Integrated Design succeeds when it is used a management process to challenge professionals from different backgrounds to think outside their typical norms of design and compare options through an iterative process for integrating systems to meet the objectives. The process can seem confusing at first, and during the phase of testing ideas collaboration is key.
This design approach can provide significant opportunities to capitalize on the expertise around the table to identify synergies of ideas through a variety of brainstorming exercises by a multi-disciplinary group of professionals who pool their efforts together to incorporate sustainable design principles in their design. This approach has also led to higher levels of performance in energy, sensitivity to environmental impacts, as well as indoor environment, functionality and a range of other related parameters.
Conventional design approaches isolate different expertise from one another. One designer initiates the design and hands it to another specialist with the direction to “make it work”. If the other professionals are clever, they may suggest advanced, high performance design elements, but their inclusion at a late stage in the design process will result in only marginal performance increases, combined with considerable capital cost increases. The underlying cause is that the introduction of high-performance systems late in the design process cannot overcome the handicaps imposed by initial incompatible or otherwise poor design decisions.
Integrated design is much more likely to ensure that the natural attributes or characteristics of a site start to shape the project. For example, positioning a building in a certain direction can dramatically increase natural daylight inside. This can dramatically reduce the demand for lighting, and it can influence heating and cooling needs. The overall energy demand for a building drops and less investment is required in the mechanical systems. There are many variables in play, and this is where Integrated Design is essential.
The Integrated Design process contains no elements that are radically new, but integrates well-proven approaches into a systematic total process. This integrates the skills and experience of different professionals at the concept design level. When carried out in a spirit of cooperation among key actors, this results in a design that has higher environmental performance and is highly efficient with minimal, and sometimes zero, incremental capital costs, along with reduced long-term operating and maintenance costs.
It is essential for the design team and the client to recognize that sustainable design is the design of both the form and the processes of cities, sites or structures. There is no magic bullet or single way to achieve integrated design style. A team that does not gel in the design process will place too much emphasis on the “how” to manage the design than the “what” of delivered design. A team of individuals who have experience working in multi-disciplinary design is best positioned to avoid this conflict of egos.
Iterative design is more costly, particularly when it involves multiple professionals. However, the costs of these processes can be managed with clear client and Project Manager-driven objectives and effective and experienced collaboration in the team. Predictive computer models (such as Energy Consumption models) are making the process easier.
The win for the client is improved design, improvements in environmental costs with modest investment if not no additional investment and lower overall operating costs over the long run with improved performance of the building in the site. The cost of Integrated Design is higher, but the potential for capital savings in the project, and the lower operating costs in the long run make this a miniscule investment.
Steve Willis is a professional urban and environmental Planner. He is Vice President of Planning and Sustainable Communities with MMM Group Limited. MMM Group Limited is a Canadian-owned multi-disciplinary consulting company with offices in Ottawa, 17 other Canadian Cites, and 7 other countries.
MMM Group Limited is a Canadian-owned multi-disciplinary consulting company with offices in Ottawa, 17 other Canadian Cites, and 7 other countries. |
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http://www.mmm.ca/
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