by Dr. Andrew H. Dent

As part of a panel discussion recently, I had the pleasure of listening to Craig Schwitter, a managing partner and of the architectural engineering firm Buro Happold, present his company’s methodology for achieving zero net energy and carbon in a building through the use of computational modeling of a range of systems that included HVAC, plumbing, air flow and lighting. What struck me was the sheer complexity of these system models and the degree to which they controlled the way the building was to be constructed.

Increasingly, in order to achieve high sustainability standards such as LEED Platinum or zero net carbon or energy, a considerable amount of computer modeling must be done by engineers such as Craig. This is done to provide information such as heat generated by sunlight, air flow through the building envelope, how the HVAC interacts with the infrastructure, how to achieve maximum efficiency with a grey water system and so on. All of these impacts are indeed interconnected. The ideal is of where the building becomes a ‘living’ system where everything works complementary to everything else, but of course this is not an easy thing to achieve. It is necessarily highly complex and thus becomes something that really only a computer is able to handle, often requiring the meshing of numerous modeling systems together to understand how synergy can be obtained. The result is that to a lesser or greater extent, this modeling controls how the building will look, how it should be angled (to catch the best sunlight), and what it should be made from. The ‘design’ of the building is being taken out of the hands of the architect and placed into the engineer’s and their computer software. Of course this is very simplified reasoning, and if this was an online article that allowed comments, I should expect some harsh responses from the architectural community, the sheer volume of information now needed to create a low impact building means that there are fewer decisions that lie fully with the architect.

One can follow the same idea in product design, and this has already been posited by others, that sustainability is taking away large aspects of design from the designer. It is deciding for us what material to use, how it should be produced and even what shape it should be (to aid recycling or other end of life concerns). The engineers are increasingly wresting the decisions away from the designer, leaving them – according to some – merely as stylists. 

Making things, whether they are buildings, cars, coffee cups or a paper clip is getting more complex because of sustainability, as anyone who has gone through an LCA (life cycle analysis) of a product can attest. With this increased quantification of all aspects of production, there is an ever larger amount of information that needs to be gathered before proceeding with a design choice, and thus it is harder for one person to keep tabs on all that information and to effectively process it to make the correct decision. It is left to computer programs to make those decisions for us to ensure that the myriad factors affecting each design decision are given the correct weighting. In much the same way that Ashby’s structure-property maps (www.grantadesign.com) are a way of using the large amount of data available on engineering materials to enable the correct selection of a material for a given set of properties, LCA databases and software programs such as Sustainable Minds are taking the selection of material, manufacturing process and even some of the form and functionality out of the realm of choice. Let us not think for a second that this will stifle design or creativity, it just puts the emphasis on the why and what for, rather than on the how. Major design firms have been moving in this direction for years, the most well known being of IDEO and Frog, with Designworks now also heading away from direct product design. 

Of course with any trend there is always, eventually a backlash, and the rise of DIY design is a wonderfully fresh response this quantification of production (Make magazine, ReadyMade). It gives the finger to the precision and slickness of automated design and manufacture, cobbling together – often with great skill – products from locally sourced waste materials, cast-offs, leftovers, and anything else they can get their hands on. It claims to fit into the sustainability landscape because of the ‘reuse’ of materials, the locality of production (often your garage or kitchen) and that the invention is typically from need. But what it really means is that humans have a desire to create, and the move towards computation and the limitations of quantified sustainability is taking away that ability in the name of progress. DIY design understands this, and in many ways it is ‘simple’ design, but don’t rely on it to be a truly sustainable solution – for that we need complexity, and yes, computers. Photo Caption: Image courtesy of Granta Design Limited: www.grantadesign.com