About Doug King

Doug King: Building Performance Expert

Doug King Photo

Professor Doug King
FREng CEng CPhys CEnv
FInstP FEI FCIBSE HonFRIBA

Doug King is a new kind of interdisciplinary building professional: A Building Performance Expert, working to fill the gaps between the conventional professional disciplines.

Creative Cross-Discipline Building Professional

As well as a Chartered Engineer, Doug is also a Chartered Physicist and Chartered Environmentalist. This unique background allows him to operate across the boundaries of conventional professional knowledge to design elegant, energy-efficient, sustainable building systems.

Equally happy presenting to stakeholders as he is defining the detail of energy analysis, having Doug on your team enables rapid and accurate evaluation of alternative design strategies, allowing you to make informed decisions saving time and money.

Strategic Vision

With his proven success in the commercial world, he is a clear-sighted, deeply knowledgeable strategist, able to see the big picture. His technical solutions align with broader client objectives, whether operational efficiency, competitive edge, shareholder value, corporate social responsibility, or even philanthropy.

Complementary Innovation

Doug looks beyond simple regulatory compliance in sustainability to identify tangible business benefits from high performance design. He is prepared to challenge convention with the application of science where this will deliver valuable advantages.

He has successfully designed exacting environments and systems for a wide variety of unique and unusual buildings, often inventing new typologies or using innovative approaches to solve conventionally intractable problems.

Intuitive Understanding

He understands intimately that the building form, as much as the engineering services, affects the comfort and productivity of occupants. His breadth of knowledge, intuitive understanding of building performance issues, and ability to communicate complex engineering concepts makes him an extremely effective design team member.

Philosophy and Passion

Doug King wants to change the construction industry paradigm, believing passionately that universal capability in sustainable development is essential not just to its future success but to the future of humankind. This attitude informs and enriches every aspect of his professional life.

In his business, he believes in co-design, working collaboratively with established design teams in an atmosphere of free intellectual exchange. The philosophy extends across the supply chain, from expert contractors to end users, to share knowledge and build industry-wide capability. This approach focuses on buildability, regional and cultural understanding and operational requirements, resulting in better and more cost-effective buildings with longer useful life.

In his public work, he has accepted prestigious policy and educational roles to pursue his philosophy. Since 2008, Doug has led a successful campaign to enhance sustainable design skills in professional education. He drove an initiative to introduce building physics into the civil engineering and architectural curriculums at UK universities. Supported by the Royal Academy of Engineering, the programme has resulted in a network of University Centres of Excellence in Sustainable Building Design.

To ensure that he retains a creative outlook in all of his work, in his spare time Doug engages in landscape and fine art photography, for which he has won numerous competitions and exhibition selections.

Recognition

Doug has been ranked amongst the most influential figures in sustainable construction in the UK by Building Design. He has been awarded Honorary Fellowship of the Royal Institute of British Architects for services to architecture and engineering and has received numerous medals and awards for engineering achievement.

Doug is probably best known however, for his persistent denouncement of EcoBling used to disguise poorly designed buildings.

Background

Current Positions
Principal, Doug King Consulting Ltd
Visiting Professor of Building Physics, Bath University
South West Design Review Panel Member
East Midlands Design Review Panel Member
Low Carbon Buildings Expert, Innovate UK
Built Environment Expert, Design Council CABE
Advisor, The Ove Arup Foundation
Qualifications
Physics BSc ARCS, Imperial College
Professional Qualifications
Chartered Environmentalist
Chartered Engineer
Chartered Physicist
Fellowships
Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering
Fellow of the Royal Institute of British Architects
Fellow of the Institute of Physics
Fellow of CIBSE
Fellow of the Energy Institute
Awards
2012 ACE Outstanding Achievement Award
2011 Royal Academy of Engineering Silver Medal
2008 ICE James Watt Medal
2007 ICE Edmund Hambley Medal
2002 ACE Young Consulting Engineer of the Year

Doug in his Own Words

I graduated with a degree in Physics from Imperial College, London. An insatiable curiosity to understand how modern buildings really worked (or more often didn’t) led me to become a building services consultant. This allowed me to apply my scientific method to solving interesting building performance problems. I learnt a keen understanding of the interconnected nature of buildings and people as complex systems.

Having worked with a number of leading, international practices I felt that the UK construction industry was failing to address its fundamental problem of fragmentation. In an attempt to address this I founded my own multidisciplinary engineering practice, King Shaw Associates, in 2002. After building the practice to commercial and critical success, I gave up my interests in 2012 to focus on developing sustainable engineering skills and capability for the whole of the construction industry.

For five years, I have been leading an initiative to revolutionise education for built environment professionals. This project has been supported by the Royal Academy of Engineering who published my two reports on low carbon design education. My recommendations have been adopted in the Low Carbon Construction Innovation & Growth Team Report (the Morell Report) and in the BIS Low Carbon Construction Action Plan.

In spring 2013, through the Royal Academy of Engineering, I launched a national network of university Centres of Excellence in Sustainable Building Design. These will offer interdisciplinary design teaching, initially involving engineers and architects, but eventually also social scientists, economists and many other associated professions.

My commercial work is now focussed on projects that allow me to share my knowledge and experience to the benefit of others. Typically I achieve this through working on projects where the demonstration potential is greatest. I also work with non commercial organisations that can benefit from my experience, such as community design partnerships in the UK and a variety of clients, including NGOs, in developing nations.