Set against the backdrop of the climate crisis and in an increasingly data-driven landscape, the built environment industry can learn from other sectors' use of open-source, exploring the value of open-data resources in progressing towards a lower carbon future. At an NLA-hosted webinar last week, representatives from Mott MacDonald, Feilden Clegg Bradley Studios and Hawkins\Brown presented their research that utilises open-data resources to produce their own freely available tools for measuring embodied and whole-life carbon in building projects.

 

Dr Joe Jack Williams from Feilden Clegg Bradley Studios presented 'FCBS Carbon'. It is a whole life carbon review tool, designed to estimate the whole life carbon of a building to inform design decisions prior to detailed design. The tool makes potential carbon impacts clear to the client, architect and the whole design team from the outset of the design process.

 

I followed, presenting a summary of how our ‘Emission Reduction Tool (H\B:ERT) developed. Hawkins\Brown worked in partnership with the UCL Institute for Environmental Design and Engineering (IEDE)'s Engineering Doctorate program to create the award-winning tool. It was a part of a research piece titled 'Refurbish or Replace - the life cycle performance of existing buildings and their replacements' by Dr Yair Schwartz, Research Associate at The Bartlett, UCL. H\B:ERT works by measuring the volume of all materials tagged in the Revit model. It then applies embodied carbon data to that material, broken down into life cycle stages (product, construction, use stage and end of life). 

 

The information surrounding whole-life and embodied carbon is complex yet critical to understand. Both tools aim to empower the industry with specialist knowledge about embodied carbon in projects during the design process. These tools ‘decode’ detailed datasets such as the University of Bath’s Inventory of Carbon and Energy (ICE) and Environmental Product Declarations (EPDs), breaking them down into a series of easy-to-understand charts and graphics that are made specific to a project. Whilst both are reporting tools, they are best used conversationally as part of the design process by allowing the designer to iteratively target and improve ‘big-win’, carbon-heavy areas of the design.

 

As they are based on freely available ‘open data’, they are then in turn free to download and use from their respective studio’s websites. H\B:ERT, a Revit-based plugin, is also fully open-source and users are encouraged to comment on and contribute towards the source code on GitHub. But in an industry where the value of knowledge has often been heavily fortified, how do you incentivise the implementation of open-source practices? 

 

Whilst presenting some key findings from Open UK’s: State of Open 2022 study, Ashleigh Monagle from Mott MacDonald highlighted the positive impact that an open-source approach can have, particularly on quality of code, development cost, maintenance cost and collaboration. 

 

It is the impact on collaborations that seems to strike a particularly sweet chord with the architecture, engineering and construction industry. Cities are not built by any one person - the entire industry is built on the backbone of collaboration. Each design project is the result of a series of conversations and collaborations between clients, building users, designers, contractors and specialists. It is this very approach that we must take to tackle the construction industry’s contribution to the climate crisis. 

 

Open-source tools and datasets can provide a framework for industry collaboration. Challenges of creating and maintaining a consistent, collaborative repository of sustainability data that is accessible must be overcome so that the whole industry can benefit from the outcomes of these open sources and move us towards a better and greener future.