Reality checking innovative designs
Recent post-occupancy of new buildings, often featuring the latest technical innovations and renewables, have revealed enormous gaps between the design intention and the actual energy consumption of some new buildings. Innovative technologies devised to achieve low energy consumption and comfortable conditions are often difficult to commission, unreliable in operation and complicated to maintain. The resulting problems require designers to adopt a strategy to ‘reality-check’ their design proposals throughout a project.
Such a strategy is described in BSRIA’s ‘Pitstopping guide’ — a process that allows construction teams to periodically reconsider critical design issues by focusing on issues of usability, manageability and maintainability from the perspective of the end user.
The guide is designed to run within the ‘Soft landings framework’ — a form of graduated handover for new and refurbished buildings.
