I have recently been asked to present to the USGBC in Mississippi about how BIM is/can be a catalyst for green design. My research got me thinking about green design as a whole. Then I thought that a blog series would be a good way to share my research and some thoughts on the topic. This is a way to look at the good, the bad, and the ugly of green design, BIM, technology; and some realizations about human nature as we try to become better.
I was trained in sustainable design during my college days. Things have changed since then. We have BIM, Green Building Studio, DOE Software, IES VE and a host of other applications that take the guesswork and long hours of manual analysis out of the equation. Design has changed since then as well. We have started experimenting with new forms as said technology has enabled us to do so. Whole industries have grown up around "green technology" to aid in making our buildings more efficient, smarter, and carbon neutral.
But I have questions:
- Can we believe, or even understand, the analysis?
- How far do we have to model to be accurate?
- Are new building forms really supporting the idea of green?
- Are all of these technologies truly beneficial, cost effective?
- How and when?
I also feel that something may be missing: People's comprehension of green strategy and an innate understanding of themselves. I have all of these great tools and technologies at my fingertips to analyze a building's design, but do I really know, without having a solid background in green strategy, what those numbers and graphics are telling me? We are assuming that because we can model a building pretty well then we can model it appropriately to be analyzed and then make good decisions based on it. We are sometimes assuming that throwing thousands of dollars of technology on a building makes it better, greener, when a simpler, cheaper solution may have solved the problem in a more succinct manner. That's what I learned in college: Simple, low-tech, thoughtful solutions based on a basic understanding of the environment that the building was going to inhabit. We didn't have the analysis tools, and I'm glad they're here now, but let's make sure that they don't replace the process they are meant to enhance. I will discuss how great these applications are in a future post, but we'll start the discussion with something that technology can't change, but much of it has been developed to combat: Ourselves.
