CREJ - Building Dialogue - September 2016
The only thing constant in the building industry is change. As facilities integrate new technologies, strive for greater energy efficiency, and seek to improve health and wellness, project teams are tasked with integrating these innovations. Change creates great opportunity, but they also can pose risks for designers, builders and owners. Enter building science, an evidence-based approach to understanding the physical behavior of the building as a system. This diverse field brings greater certainty to the building process with a collection of scientific research, analytical tools and testing methods for the physical phenomena affecting buildings and the people who occupy them. Until recently, most building science groups focused only on building enclosure and system performance. Today, the field has expanded to take on a greater role in an evidence-based design process, looking at how the built environment can influence well-being and promote occupant satisfaction. “Implementing a research process as part of a building project picked up momentum in the health care market when evidence clearly showed that the physical environment influenced healing outcomes. This is now being applied to learning and workplace environments,” said Marcel Harmon, project executive of Forte Building Science, a division of M.E. Group. Building projects (both new construction and renovations) are typically a response to a need for space that is user-driven. Rarely is a new building constructed for a population that doesn’t already exist in an organization. Users have already formed individual and cultural behaviors and customs, and few projects seek to understand what these are and how they should influence the design of the new space. An example of how the Forte team incorporates building science into a project is by using a process called “ethnography.” Through ethnography, contextual surveys and interviews are conducted with occupant populations using a trained social scientist early in the design phase. The information extracted from this process yields valuable information that is leveraged by the owner and design teams to create the best possible spaces that are customized specifically for the occupant. Working with one particular client’s workforce during predesign, trained social scientists prepared an ethnographic study that showed potential issues that were specific to existing occupant groups. These included a high percentage of introverts, a cultural avoidance of conflict and a strong desire for control over their own spaces. Armed with this information, building scientists helped craft the owner’s project requirements to incorporate their social needs. When teams take a scientific approach to understanding occupant-specific needs before the design starts, it can dramatically change the entire design process for the better. As it stands now, designers are often forced to make assumptions and rely on intuition. The scientific approach taken to develop the owner’s project requirements allows teams to incorporate metrics that will represent project success. These include indoor environmental quality metrics that correlate to visual, auditory and thermal comfort, as well as traditional metrics like energy use and cost. Many people are unaware that most of the elements related to indoor environmental quality metrics can actually be modeled. While traditional building models focus on energy use, IEQ software and research can be leveraged for needs like thermal, auditory and visual comfort. While energy efficiency remains one of the critical issues of our times, too often spaces that perform well from an energy standpoint fail from an occupant comfort standpoint. Finding solutions that work well for both requires more robust analysis during the design phase. The General Services Administration leveraged a tool that Forte developed to predict the occupant productivity cost impact of each energy-efficiency strategy that was being considered. On average, the productivity impacts had 4+ times more cost savings than the corresponding energy conservation strategy. “As building scientists, we enjoy working with architects and engineers because we tend to complement their expertise and support them in solving the few issues that can really cause them headaches,” said Forte Project Manager Stuart Shell. pete.jefferson@megroup.com