The recent explosion of digital tools for environmental analysis has made it easier than ever to ‘do less bad’. Measuring the damage we do today and reducing that of tomorrow is not yet trivial, but there are countless software packages and metrics available to help. Regenerative design, however, holds designers to a higher standard, and actively improving human and environmental health requires more than an arsenal of metrics. Improving health requires a vision greater than any single number, and oversimplification poses a danger of treating the newly available tools as implements of technocracy. Few architects enter the field of design to be technocrats; most are motivated by creativity. The design process can be a turbulent sea to navigate, and a project’s destination is ultimately determined through discussion. Digital tools play a key role in describing regenerative strategies within these design discussions.
The last several decades have seen a gradual transformation in the digital tools themselves, from tools which were designed specifically for evaluating HVAC systems towards tools intended to assess the performance of an entire building. The family of plugins in Ladybug Tools builds further upon this development and acts as a node between the realms of building science, thermal comfort analysis, and architectural design [1]. Architects can now retrieve a great variety of daylighting and thermal comfort metrics at the level of spatial precision necessary for making design decisions. This astounding degree of analytical flexibility has resulted in a subsequent Cambrian explosion in forms of digital analysis. Designers can build a systematic framework specific to the questions of each project.
The result is that architects now have access to rich bodies of information composed of multiple metrics when making design decisions. This opens possibilities for regenerative strategies, but it also makes it necessary to choose which metrics are most important. It will always be easier to optimise isolated measures as an effort to ‘do less bad’ than to map the constellation of metrics which prove a proposal is actively contributing to human or environmental health.
NEW METRICS FOR DIGITAL
David Benjamin’s collection of essays – ‘Embodied Energy and Design, Making Architecture Between Metrics and Narratives’ - addresses the difficulties of relying on any single measure [2].
Net Zero excludes embodied energy. Embodied energy does not necessarily imply reduced emissions. Reduced emissions are but a tiny part of human well-being. It seems the path forward requires a vision for health that triangulates many available metrics, weaving them into a coherent narrative.
QUANTIFY THE IMPACT OF DECISIONS
Such a muddy terrain greatly benefits nimble architects, who can quantify the impact of their decisions. One obstacle is that traditional architectural representation requires training and experience to read. The lines locating walls on a plan drawing might be explicit, but the reason for their configuration is often left implicit. Where is the sun shining? When? How does it interact with the breeze? Would more thermally massive walls make the design better or worse? The challenge for designers is to assess the cumulative impact of many effects and ultimately document the value that their decisions implicitly create.
This is not a form of analysis that can be easily outsourced to engineers because it is intertwined with the creative process.
Fortunately, it is possible to greatly smooth collaboration with engineers because these tools offer architects the capacity to communicate more precisely than before. Take deciding on a window-to-wall ratio as an example. Prior to the advent of these tools, an architect might have had to rely on a single value for the window-to-wall ratio of an entire building. Now, architects can arrive at an engineering meeting with printed elevation drawings of every facade specifying levels of solar radiation for all hours of the year per square meter. This is a dramatically different starting point for discussion that creates possibilities for more holistic decision-making.
Architects have been the party responsible for crafting these arguments on behalf of holistic quality for millennia. Vitruvius divided this responsibility by distilling architectural quality down to firmitatis, utilitatis, and venustas (stability, utility, and beauty).
Today, the assessment of design quality is fractured even more and scattered among countless specialists. However, architects are still the party responsible for assembling these fragments into holistic regenerative strategies. For example, an external canopy might play a regenerative role by increasing outdoor comfort, blocking solar radiation, and collecting rainwater. Quantifying these benefits makes it possible to speak the same language as retail consultants who want to see increased foot-traffic, engineers who need to size HVAC, or municipalities concerned about water infrastructure. Digital tools offer the power to express design options in precise, data-oriented, and contemporary terms.
DATA VISUALIZATION
Visualising simulation results not only makes the information available to the design process, but it also changes the way that data is interpreted. The pairings of analysis in Figure 22 and Figure 23 illustrate this idea. Figure 22 illustrates the difference between evaluating an entire room abstractly (left) and focusing on the needs of an artist who intends to paint in that room (right). This represents a shift in the unit of analysis from the room to the occupant. Metrics like Spatial Daylight Autonomy for LEED or Daylight Factor / Uniformity Ratio for BREEAM only reward homogenous lighting over an entire room or floor. This is useful information, but it only approximates the needs of any specific activity. It also rules out the possibility of the shadow being desirable. Figure 23 offers an example of how visual interpretation of data might steer the design changes. The abstract representation (left) shows a balcony that receives a significant amount of direct sunlight but placing human figures on the balcony (right) makes it clear that only one person can sunbathe at a time. This is a qualitative conclusion based on the same quantitative output but may lead to a different design outcome. Figure 24 shows four complementary representations of sunlight, which offers a glimpse into the assumptions built into different types of daylighting analysis.
These tools may pave the way for introducing joy into the repertoire of regenerative architectural qualities. The notion of thermal joy based on contrast has existed for decades. Lisa Heschong’s meditation on solar heating, Thermal Delight in Architecture, explores many forms of thermal joy in design, particularly those related to the sun [3].
Figure 22
This figure illustrates how curating simulation data can impact its interpretation. These two images show the difference between evaluating lux levels of an entire room abstractly (left) versus focusing on the needs of an artist who intends to paint in that room (right).
Figure 23
This figure illustrates how placing human figures among simulation data can offer context. The abstract representation of hours of direct sun (left) benefits from scale human figures (right) because they show that only one person can sunbathe at a time.
Salmaan Craig, a pioneer in architectural heat-exchanger design, paints a more recent portrait of thermal pleasure based on the contrast in his essay entitled ‘Beyond Thermal Monotony’ [4]. He notes how remarkably sensitive human skin can be and describes how sharp thermal contrast shapes the lives of our evolutionary cousins, the Macaque Monkey, who live in the hot springs and frozen mountain-scapes of Nagano, Japan. The ability of these digital tools to infuse the design process with data on temperature gradients or maps of solar radiation may result in more than the sum of the individual parts.
Figure 24
Four different types of daylighting analysis.
Clockwise from top left: 1) a geometric tracing of the annual sun path; 2) a CIE diffuse sky used for Daylight Factor, which ignores the direction from which the sun comes; 3) a climate-based sky that represents a snapshot of the sky at 9:00am on March 20th; 4) a Tregenza sky dome which represents the cumulative intensity of radiation over an entire year.
INTEGRATE THE DEVELOPMENT OF TOOLS
Digital tools are also a point of contact between the ideas that regenerative design embodies and built projects. In this regard, it is important for designers to integrate the development of these tools and to demand that they reflect expected conditions.
For example, it is only recently that adaptive comfort research emphasised that high air speeds can be beneficial in warm environments [5], while it seems obvious that a breeze is pleasant in the summertime. This gap could have serious implications for the tropics and the Majority World. In terms of ensuring access to these tools, it is also important to insist on tools which are adaptable, affordable, and well-documented [1]. The latter is especially important because these tools are new, and it is easy for designers to drift astray inadvertently. It should be common knowledge, for example, that Daylight Factor was developed for the cloudy weather of the United Kingdom, and that it is a poor measure in areas with strong direct sun, like the tropics.
The quality of results from introducing these tools to practising architects will be determined by the ability of practitioners to stay abreast of underlying assumptions and new developments.
Quantifying regenerative design poses challenges that simply
‘doing less bad’ does not. However, the digital tools available offer a constellation of metrics and measures for bringing a coherent narrative to complex contexts. This opens creative possibilities and makes it possible for architects to cross-reference many forms of analysis. As architects gain access to this information, they will acquire an added power to argue for the value that design implicitly creates, but they also inherit a responsibility to be critical of the tools at their disposal.
REFERENCES
[1] The Ladybug Tools family of tools is open-source, and there is an ever-growing body of learning resources, including the forums on https://discourse.ladybug.tools, example files https://hydrashare.github.io/hydra/ and the Official Honeybee Wiki.
[2] Benjamin, David, editor. Embodied Energy and Design: Making Architecture Between Metrics and Narratives. New York, NY: Columbia University GSAPP; Zurich, Switzerland Lars Muller Publishers, 2017.
[3] Lisa Heschong. Thermal Delight in Architecture. Cambridge MA, The MIT Press, 1979.
[4] Craig, Salmaan. ‘Beyond Thermal Monotony.’ Essays on Thermodynamics, Architecture and Beauty, by Iñaki Ábalos and Renata Sentkiewicz. Lluis Ortega editor. Actar, 2015, 14-16.
[5] R.J. de Dear et al. ‘Review Article: Progress in thermal comfort research over the last twenty years’. Indoor Air 2013: vol 23: pp. 442-461.
Regenerative design processes are those in which design aims and targets go beyond currently established sustainable and environmentally friendly paradigms. Regenerative design solutions should positively contribute to the ecosystems in which they are inserted, thereby regenerating the environmental qualities of site and context to its original condition and beyond [1-4], an ambition that requires a substantial amount of evidence from concept generation to concept validation. Thus, designers nowadays make extensive use of digital tools not only to explore