Page 70 - Green Building Through Integrated Design

AN ARCHITECT’S PERSPECTIVE 47

The most successful process we’ve employed to help people to change is this: at the
first goal-setting charrette, we map out a design process that shows how people are
going to be integrating and communicating, when they’re going to be talking and
why. It’s a very detailed map. It’s not a “critical path;” it’s an integration roadmap.
Without that roadmap, people will fall back into usual practice patterns.*

According to Reed, the basic elements of integrated design include the following
activities:

■ The client’s primary, financial decision maker is in the design process.
■ The client selects a design team with the right attitude, one of being willing to learn.
(Reed has told me that difficult situations can often occur on projects where the
client has already hired a “starchitect,” a famous designer who will not commit to
participate in a team process or even to attend all the key early project meetings; in
that case, as a consultant, Reed sometimes refuses to work on such a project,
because the odds for a successful integrated design outcome are much smaller.)
■ Stakeholders and the project team spend time aligning expectations and purposes.
■ Specific goals are set for a range of environmental targets, even within a LEED cer-
tification goal (e.g., we’re going to save 50 percent of the energy of a conventional
building, regardless of the LEED rating).
■ The client and the design leader identify process champions to uphold these goals
throughout the design and construction effort.
■ System designs are optimized early in the process, using an iterative process in pre-
design and schematic design phases.
■ The design team commits to follow through all the way to the end of construction.
■ The project is commissioned to make sure that all systems perform as designed.
■ There is ongoing monitoring and maintenance, to ensure that the project attains its
desired performance goals. †

For Reed, integrated design is all about changing mental models, dominant patterns
of seeing the world and paradigms for performing in certain ways. He believes it’s crit-
ical to break up the narrow boundaries of specialists to return to a more holistic way
of viewing design. According to Reed, this is very difficult: “shifting the nature and
practice of design from a linear, simplistic cause-and-effect process to one that con-
siders issues from multiple and interrelated systems perspectives is resisted more than
any other aspect of green design.” ‡
One thing Reed emphasizes is that the process must be “front-end loaded” with multi-
ple iterations of design ideas and thorough explorations of possibilities happening quickly
in the first 2 months of a project. Figure 3.2 shows how the potential cost-effective oppor-
tunities for integrated design diminish rapidly over the course of a project.

*Interview with Bill Reed, February 2008.
† Bill Reed, “Integrated Design,” May 8, 2005, private memorandum.
‡ Bill Reed, “The Integrative Design Process—Changing Our Mental Model,” April 20, 2006, private
memorandum.