ARC 327R / ARC 386M Seminar
Tues/Thurs 2:00 – 3:30pm, SUT 2.112
Open to all SOA and non-SOA students
Michael Garrison: mgarrison@utexas.edu
Architects are expected to be creative aesthetic designers, while at the same time have a mastery of building technologies to create high-performance buildings. This process requires critical thinking skills that take disparate information and make independent and logical connections with the information and form new thoughts rather than just passively receiving information. The new high-performance standards for regenerative and sustainable building designs require a deeper understanding of the information knowledge base of building subsystems, the range of their operational principles, and the values of their performance data. A data-driven design process represents a huge potential to develop a more informed building design process.
Data-driven design is the practice of informing design decisions based on data rather than intuition or personal preference. Building Information Management (BIM) systems have already introduced this direction in the building sector, using synergy executions of efficient collaborative workflows to improve building energy management systems (EMS). However, the building design process still relies heavily on rules of thumb and tacit knowledge gained from previous experiences, which may not be directly applicable or are not based on sound evidence. High-performance regenerative and sustainable building design requires a greater understanding of the complex interactions between context-specific microclimates, symbiotic building systems, multidisciplinary inputs, and diverse outputs, which make a design process based only on tacit knowledge difficult to formalize or make explicit. To improve the design process and effectively build towards a sustainable future requires a deeper understanding of the value of the data we need to rely on.