Session 3.4
LAB: Architects will save the world: simple AI tools to get to net zero in conceptual design
Synopsis:
Decisions made in the earliest stages of design have the most impact on a building’s carbon footprint. Unfortunately, they’re often uninformed because the tools for analyzing carbon don’t target the people making these decisions.
This Lab empowers all architects to make and explain environmentally responsible decisions using Spacemaker’s AI-powered analyses.
Learning Objectives:
1. Learn how early phase decisions impact embodied carbon
2. Learn how early phase design decisions, including window/wall/roof construction and window-wall-ratio impact operational energy
3. Gain experience and intuition about how design decisions impact building performance
4. Learn how to balance tradeoffs and design in an outcome-based way
Body:
In this Lab, participants will use Spacemaker to set up their own project and start designing and experimenting! We’ll cover how to use our rapid operational energy analysis to see and build intuition on the impact of compactness, orientation, and with a few other basic building parameters on operation energy.
We’ll dig into our AI-powered embodied carbon analysis to understand how a building’s form and primary materials impact the carbon in its structure and façade. And we’ll cover how to understand the tradeoffs between these two and other analyses; while you want to reduce the carbon intensity of your buildings, you need to know how to do it without sacrificing other living qualities. How can we preserve daylight while also creating a high-performing building? While adding insulation improves operation energy, does its added embodied carbon offset that benefit? The built environment isn’t optimized for a single objective; you need all of this information in the same place.
The decisions with the greatest impact on both embodied and operational carbon are made in conceptual design. While there are remedial steps available later in the design process, the scope of a project’s carbon is largely set by its form and primary materials; their impact on embodied carbon is particularly immense. By integrating easy-to-use, AI-powered operational energy and embodied carbon analyses into a design tool that architects are already using, Spacemaker brings data-driven decision making to early-stage sustainable design.
We are all interested in doing our part to fight climate change. As an architect, it starts with sustainable design in conceptual planning because the most impactful carbon-related decisions you make are the first decisions you make. We bring outcome-driven design to the earliest stages of your process, so you understand the impact of these decisions when you’re making them.