An excerpt from 'Design to Value: The architecture of holistic design and creative technology' book by Mark Bryden, Professor John Dyson, Jaimie Johnston MBE and Martin Wood.
Healthy architecture: building design for a post-COVID world.With a new model for office-based working, the current design of buildings will play a very important role in the transition to a ‘new normal’, with a focus on providing adequate support for the physical and mental re-adaptation to new work-life scenarios.
The growing importance given to wellbeing means that post-pandemic buildings need to be adaptable, healthy design spaces, and address the following key challenges:.Rethinking the status quo for more sustainable building design.To rethink the status quo, we need to question how spaces have been designed traditionally, including their size, location, density and layout; and ultimately upgrade them to higher, more sustainable standards, using building physics, science and analytic tools..
Traditionally, offices in the UK are large spaces located in city centres, accommodating all staff in the same location, where connectivity and business opportunities are at hand.This idea is already being challenged by companies who are moving towards operating smaller hubs, strategically located at walking or cycling distance from the areas where staff live, often far from the city centre.. With people having demonstrated they are able to work from home effectively (and sometimes more effectively), offices do not need to be sized to operate constantly at full occupancy.
This approach is beneficial for improving sustainability and work-life balance, reduces time spent commuting and lessens corporate carbon emissions from heating, cooling and especially daily commuting, which typically accounts for the highest proportion of a company’s carbon footprint.. Bryden Wood carried out an internal carbon emissions audit, which showed that the adoption of home-working can reduce corporate emissions by 69% compared to working five days a week in the office.
This is mainly due to the reduction in emissions from Scope 3 (commuting)..Essentially, there is a massive, potential long-term benefit to gathering this type of data.
Unfortunately, while we already have the ability to use IoT successfully to gather substantial amounts of this type of useful information, investment for this type of work isn’t necessarily present at the moment.Currently, fund managers are focusing more on internal building technology.
This results from a desire to achieve a better return on investment, and a focus on short-term impact over long-term benefits.While this type of technology might seem more exciting in some respects, it isn’t necessarily as truly valuable as the data sets we could be unlocking from construction if we approached things differently and looked at other ways of using construction technology to consistently gather beneficial information from our construction sites.