Design Process - Read in Conjunction with diagram.

Detailed Design Brief- A detailed design brief is prepared in consultation with the client.

Schematic Design Phase – At this stage further discussion with the client is required as more needs to be known about the building at this stage so the client must build relationships with the influential design professionals, this includes architects, engineers, mechanical contractors and builders. Preliminary discussions with Local councils and quantity Surveyors are carried out at this stage their work indicates topography, presence of trees and other structure that could influence project cost, as well as some critical building code, environmental and zoning issues, such as parking with its drainage and water run-off challenges.

This phase includes a preliminary design and a prediction of approximate building costs and construction time lines, system costs and benefits are reviewed at this stage.

Most of the Vital Energy System choices are generally made at this early stage, bias and experience may tend to guide the decisions; Engineers are generally not willing to experiment with Energy Efficient technologies they might not fully understand or could be a financial risk to their company. Many priorities other than operating cost tend to push the design in a direction at this time. Issues surrounding hospitals are concerned about reliability and redundancy, hotels tend to focus on architecture and amenities, speculative office buildings are frequently designed for lowest construction cost.

This stage also includes a preliminary design and a prediction of approximate building costs and construction time lines, system costs and benefits are also reviewed.

Design Development Application / Consent – These are formal document stages where the client may or may not give consent to go ahead with the design.

Earlier energy system design decisions tend to remain unchanged through this stage even though the specific mechanical systems are not developed until the Detailed Engineering Drawing stage, this is somewhat natural given the "stop and start" nature to the earlier stages of the design process, by the time the design team gets to the design development and contract development stage, they don't want to do any further evaluative work. This partly is due to the fee structure. The design team is often working the hardest now and the project fees may be running out. Therefore, unless extra funds are released to do the value engineering to consider any last minute concepts, they are unlikely to be taken seriously.

Submission To Council for Construction Certificate – Certificate is required from the Council permitting construction.

Detailed Engineering Drawings – Once development consent is received, detailed construction drawings and specifications are prepared. Various consultants, architects Civil, Services Engineers, are liasing at this stage.

Calling of Tenders – Bids from Builders for construction work and Building Services Contractors for installation work.

Findings

What was discovered from research of building design practice/process was that:

· Building design tends to be driven by cost rather than energy efficiency or reducing CO₂ emissions.

· Bias and experience tend to drive construction and energy system selection, as engineers tend not to like working with new concepts they may know little about and because of cost uncertainties associated with new technologies, this often may lead to energy efficient technologies being overlooked.

· The technology choices within Building Design Practise are rather ad hock and there may often be no early consideration of energy efficient technologies and no technology selection process or selection tools to enable the best possible energy efficient building solution.

Barrier Discovered

So far it has been shown that the current methodology used to decide upon the various technologies to be integrated into a new building is fairly ad hoc at the best of times. The downfall of this is that the various environmental or economic benefits or advantages associated with different technologies are often overlooked. In many cases a particular technology is included within the design of a building as a result of the experience of the engineers or designers working on the project. The initial objectives of the project were to review the current state of the art technologies and the design process used for energy efficient buildings. As our team found there was no general methodology used in the integration of these technologies we decided to construct a methodology which could be used in the design process for energy efficient buildings or influence Building professionals to consider Energy Efficient design.

THE METHODOLOGY