Join Dominique Davison, AIA, LEED AP BC+C, with Draw Architecture + Design for this presentation.

In the US alone, more than $930 billion was spent in the building and construction industry in 2013. Those investments have an enormous impact on our grid’s energy, our use of material resources, water, clean air and open space. Moreover, most buildings have an average life of 50 years (per the 2030 Challenge statistics), and so their impact on our environment and communities is long term.

In the design industry, the typical building design process operates according to the 80-20 rule, by which roughly 80 percent of a project’s costs result from the first 20 percent of design decisions. Within the typical design process, this means that critical decisions affecting building and site performance and long-term environmental impacts – including energy consumption, water use, stormwater retention, and greenhouse gas emissions – are made very early in the design process, before reliable performance calculations can be made using currently available tools. In this design process, calculations for impact areas such as stormwater runoff and water usage are not made until the design refinement stages, if at all. This current process is expensive, time consuming and inefficient, yet demand for improved building and site performance is on the rise, propelled by federal and local government mandates, more rigorous building energy codes, incentive programs, owner goals, and industry-led initiatives, such as the Architecture 2030 Challenge.

Open Data has the potential to significantly disrupt this process and help practitioners meet the rising demand for sustainable solutions and performance.

A growing number of cities and other organizations are making certain data sets available for public access, enabling the development of a new generation of design tools designed to synthesize an aggregate of data and scalable perspectives on numerous facets of building and site performance. Even more important, this data is accessible at the earliest stages of design and planning.

This program is worth 1 HSW and lunch will be provided.