Lets Talk Business

Posted on June 24, 2013 by Doug King

In sustainable construction it has become commonplace to focus on carbon footprint. We cleave to the metric of kg CO2e / m2 for both operational or embodied carbon. This has clearly grown out of the practice of valuing buildings by floor area. Yet this measure of sustainability is largely meaningless to the leaders of businesses that will occupy our buildings.

Businesses have their own measures of performance and success. In commercial enterprises these are likely to involve profitability and productivity ratios. Schools will measure their performance in terms of learning outcomes, hospitals by recovery rates. None of these measures relates to floor area.

A business leader choosing premises needs to evaluate many criteria. It is well known that location is a primary consideration. Design, as in the overt appearance, may also play a role. However, since assessing performance against building carbon footprint quickly becomes complex, it is rare that sustainable design gets sufficient consideration.

By sustainable design, I of course mean design that addresses the social and economic performance of business, not just the carbon footprint of buildings. There is plenty of evidence that well designed workplace leads to happier and more productive staff. This should be of immediate interest to a business leader, as the cost of staff dissatisfaction and absenteeism is likely to far exceed the cost of energy in offices.

On the other hand, less tangible design features should also feature in property decisions. Workplace designs with higher carbon footprints, such as air-conditioning, may actually permit higher occupation densities, in other words more staff in the same space. These considerations should also be critical in the choice of premises if only the benefits could be made explicit.

The simple metrics of construction cost and carbon emission by floor area do not reveal any useful information about the true benefits of a building’s design. Imagine instead metrics for office buildings of construction cost and carbon emission per workstation at design occupancy. These give direct measures of the efficiency of the design in terms that are meaningful to the occupier.

These metrics allow true comparison between naturally ventilated out of town offices with low occupation and a densely occupied, air-conditioned, city-centre offices. These metrics would allow a business leader to immediately relate productivity to resource consumption via the vector of staff. This is a compelling tool for property related decision-making.

It doesn’t end with commercial offices. If we understand the end user businesses a little better we can develop metrics for cost and carbon efficiency appropriate to any business sector. We would measure the efficiency of a hotel by bed space and a distribution warehouse by the number of pallets of goods accommodated. It will require some work to establish suitable measures at the outset, but this will lead to better business outcomes for us as well as our customers.

The recent RIBA survey of chartered practices revealed that the majority do not have a business plan nor set themselves business performance targets. We would probably also find this to be true of consulting engineers and other related professionals. This lack of familiarity with business issues could be limiting our ability to communicate with our customers in language familiar to them.

If we want to see substantial change in sustainable construction we may need to start by changing ourselves a little. A bit more business savvy would not go amiss. Not only would we be more successful in the business of making buildings, but we could learn the language of business to better communicate our skills and ideas to our customers. Measuring the cost and impacts of buildings in terms that are evident and compelling to business leaders has to be a good start in the transition to a new paradigm.

Measure Progress Not Just Carbon

Posted on April 28, 2013 by Doug King

I have been thinking for a little while about the suitability or otherwise of the metrics we use to measure sustainability. Given peoples’ reactions at a few meetings recently, including the Edge Debate on the Politics of Carbon Measurement and a conversation with the UK Consul for Climate Change in Chongqing, I think that the time has come to look seriously at this issue.

Presently we attempt to measure the impacts of what we build, but we rarely measure the beneficial outcomes. Therefore we risk focussing attention on all that is bad and forgetting the good. Taken to extremes we could end up going backwards socially and economically in order to address the political imperative to deliver zero (or at least very low) carbon buildings. For example, many sub-saharan africans live in housing that would easily satisfy the Zero Carbon Hub’s definition. However if we were to adopt housing of this standard in the UK it would not be considered social progress. This rather exaggerated example highlights the need to find some form of metric that acknowledges the benefits of expending some carbon in certain circumstances in order to deliver social and economic progress.

I was involved a few years ago in a new headquarters building for CAFOD in Lambeth. The building followed closely on the heels of two other charity headquarters, Heelis, the National Trust HQ and the Woodland Trust HQ, and it received comparatively little attention. Perhaps this was because the CAFOD building was mechanically ventilated and cooled, whereas the others were natural ventilation exemplars. CAFOD had to be mechanically cooled as the tight urban site available required a very high occupancy density to accommodate the entire organisation, whereas the other buildings were on suburban or extra-urban sites with plenty of space for low occupancy density and natural ventilation. On the face of it this means that the CAFOD building was both more expensive and had higher carbon emissions. However these standard metrics of cost and carbon per square metre of space do not account for how the buildings can subsequently be used. I decided to look again at the buildings in terms of the occupancy. Occupancy rates are after all what office tenants will be most interested in. The results completely reversed the ranking of the three buildings as shown below.

Whilst the metric of carbon per desk or carbon per worker is certainly much more useful than carbon per square metre in linking impact to business targets, an even better metric would link carbon to a measure of business success, such as productive hours or added value. Thus at a stroke we would be able to distinguish between well designed environmental buildings that reduce carbon and promote productivity and those that pay scant attention to the design and bolt on EcoBling to achieve the carbon reduction.

Take hospitals as another example. Lots of good work has been done in the past on identifying the quality design factors that influence patient outcomes, by providing a better working environment or recovery environment. The NHS metric for energy efficiency is presently kWh/m3 per year. Using such measures as targets can create perverse incentives. A hospital could economise on carbon by reducing ventilation rates, but this would increase recovery times and cross infection rates. A better metric for the NHS would surely be kWh per bed, to account for spatial efficiency, but in order to measure the real success of hospitals we should link energy efficiency to patient outcomes. Perhaps a metric of kWh per patient discharged. The shorter the stay in hospital the better the outcome for both the patient and the NHS and the less energy expended in achieving the outcome.

Designing these new metrics will be complicated to get right. As soon as any measure is adopted as a target it creates an incentive and we must ensure that the perverse incentives in the system are as few and as little impact as possible. However any work in this area has got to be better than simply sticking with metrics that incentivise unrealistic outcomes for the businesses that have to occupy the buildings. If those of us who work in sustainability want to see positive outcomes from our efforts then we must find means to set the importance of carbon reduction within social and economic context that will deliver better business outcomes too.

Right to Low Carbon

Posted on February 21, 2013 by Doug King

This week all attention seems on rights to light. A proposal has been made that the historic right to occupy your home without needing to turn the lights on during the hours of daylight could be brushed away in order to permit more dense urban development.

Surely this is another example of legislators failing to consider the consequences of their actions. We are driving forward with national legislation to force all new buildings to become zero carbon in an attempt to meet our carbon budgets. Meanwhile, work by the Green Construction Board indicates that we will need to work just as hard, if not harder, to cut carbon emissions from the existing building stock. Now we have a proposal that will force an increase in energy consumption on the neighbours of new development that is deemed desirable. I have no doubt that the desirability of the new developments will be based on their energy efficiency credentials, so who actually stands to win from this situation?

However, in the sustainable urban future, we will find that other rights become just as important as rights to light. Our plan to decarbonise the UK presently relies on the pervasive use of PV in the urban environment to supposedly offset carbon emissions at other times of the year. As taxation falls more heavily on carbon emissions I believe that we will see more and more legal disputes over someone interfering with neighbours attempts to cut energy consumption. This will not be just over rights to daylight, but I predict disputes over rights to unpolluted fresh air for natural ventilation and access to renewable energy sources such as the wind and sunshine.

This PV installation was an exemplar when installed, until the neighbours built higher.

Since Government is presently considering changes to legislation on rights to light, now is the time to look to the future that we want to build for ourselves and implement broader and better informed legislation that protects building owners rights to comply with carbon emissions legislation in the manner that suits them best.

Innovation Ignorance

Posted on October 10, 2012 by Doug King

There has been a plethora of debate recently about stimulating innovation in the construction industry, but it seems to me that all discussions have missed the fundamental point:

“There is no incentive for construction industry players to innovate.”

Innovation is expensive so there needs to be adequate reward for investment in innovation. In manufacturing, innovation is rewarded by lower production costs or higher product sales, which when multiplied by thousands or millions of products adds up to a considerable incentive.

In construction, a team is assembled to deliver a single product. They may never have worked together before and may never work together again. Some of them may be competitors. The main beneficiary of any innovation is certainly not going to be any of the design team; it is most likely to be the end user who may not even be known at the time of design. How then is the team incentivised to innovate?

Innovation may be in the interests of the developer if this means that buildings are more attractive to customers, but our dysfunctional property market means that the premium for location outweighs that for building performance by such a margin that innovation becomes irrelevant. Further, the developer has the counter incentive to pay the lowest design and construction cost possible to maximise his return in the market.

The reality is that the construction industry won’t innovate unless there is a strong reason for doing so, but that can’t happen with the present property market. Government could lead the way by procuring public sector construction in a way that directly rewards innovators, rather than persisting in least first cost procurement, but that would require joined up thinking which has never been their strength. However that would be a much more productive approach than continuing to lambaste an industry for something beyond its control.

Language Barrier

Posted on April 20, 2012 by Doug King

I’ve just had the pleasure of being keynote speaker at Black Architecture’s first breakfast briefing, talking on the subject of Eco-Porn in building design. The event was a huge success and stimulated a lot of high level debate about how the property industry can take the sustainability agenda forward and also deliver substantial additional value for clients and occupiers. (Sorry -Chatham House Rules)

One of the key issues that did arise from the discussions however, was that of language. It is becoming clear to me that we designers do not speak the same language when we talk about sustainability as is spoken by property investors and those who appraise buildings. This results in the standard tick-list approach to environmental appraisal, as we see embodied in rating systems such as BREEAM and LEED, becoming the default intermediary for communicating sustainability between parties. Unfortunately, any rating system that is simple enough that it can be applied universally, by expert designers and non experts assessors alike, must contain elements of compromise. At the moment, that compromise appears to be manifesting itself in a loss of essential energy performance and operational information.

Don’t get me wrong; I am a great fan of environmental rating systems in raising the aspiration for building design. But I don’t believe that when appraising a building we can substitute a single overall rating for all the richness of information that we can convey through proper communication. Building occupiers are increasingly interested in maintenance and running costs and we need to be able to drill down within any rating system to interrogate the underlying performance data and understand how the performance is achieved.

For instance a potential tenant should be able to draw comparisons between a BREEAM Excellent building achieved through energy conservative design which will save them money and one achieved by attaching Eco-Bling post-factum which will cost them far more in the long run. This will require intelligent translation between techno-babble and econo-speak. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again many times I am sure: if we designers want to be at the forefront of the sustainable property revolution, then we really need to learn a new language to communicate our ideas; that of finance and economics.