Enabling sustainable design through an information framework

Services that architects provide are no longer constrained to offering inspiring design solutions to client needs and whims; their services are beginning to spread across domains to ensure that proposed designs are also ‘green’ and/or ‘sustainable’. Indeed, design and delivery of sustainable buildings is gradually gathering momentum, manifest in the way that building performance and functionality are being viewed within an overall ecological context. The ongoing transformation from the traditional to a sustainable building design process is no longer a question of whether to build but rather how (Kibert 2005). Of the many tools available to aid sustainable design, building rating systems offer guidelines and means for comparing and benchmarking buildings performance (Fowler and Rauch 2006). The nature of sustainable building rating systems is such that they are evolving—in this respect this paper describes research that engages this paradigm through the deployment of a sustainable information framework and computational tools.