Foresight Trifecta
by Matthew VanSweden
I’ve been providing sustainable building design consulting services for almost two decades. Most of this time has been directly collaborating with designers, engineers, contractors, and building owners. Over the years, I’ve noticed two dominant yet elusive opportunities for meaningful, amplified impact within the life cycle of any given building; first, how buildings are maintained after initial occupancy, and second, the human organizations that function within.
When thinking about life-cycle impact, first-costs are generally estimated to equate to about 2% of a project's total life-cycle cost. Operational expenses are estimated to be 3x the first-cost (associated with the first opportunity identified above), yet still only account for a mere 6% of total life-cycle costs. The balance, 92%, is associated with the cost of doing business within — human salaries and supply chains (the second opportunity). We know that when just 1% of a building’s first-costs are spent, 70% of its life-cycle impacts are determined. While it is exceedingly important to focus on these first-costs, we cannot continue to ignore the other two huge components of the life-cycle as a profession.
Despite the clear and obvious opportunities, the architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC) industry has really struggled to connect the dots between first-costs and operational costs of the building to business and organizational costs within the building.
Operations + Maintenance
Operations and maintenance have long been identified as a barrier to the promise of high-performance building design. Often, one organizational team handles the initial design and construction activities while a completely separate team provides the ongoing operations and maintenance. Sometimes these separate teams are well-coordinated and share resources and lessons learned between themselves. That level of collaboration is the exception that proves the rule, however. What is far more typical is that these distinct teams remain separate and siloed, rarely coordinating on best practices. Sometimes, adversarial relationships emerge between the design and implementation team and the operation and maintenance team. Internal drivers and organizational motivators contribute to the dysfunction. One team is motivated by speed to delivery and minimizing first-costs; they value being on time and under budget. The other is motivated by the ease of maintenance and optimizing the ever-shrinking operational budget.
What is more, across the country and sectors, operations and maintenance teams are under-resourced. This dwindling number of maintenance personnel is required to cover an ever-expanding building footprint. Facility Directors are retiring and these positions are not being filled. The expertise “in the field” is not keeping up with the complexity of the building being built.
Combined, these two conditions—the dysfunctional team dynamics and the under-resourcing of O+M functions—put a tremendous amount of strain on buildings and their occupants over time. Maintenance gets deferred. Shortcuts get hacked. Staff turns over. Manuals get buried or lost or forgotten. As a result, occupants suffer, and energy consumption increases; more resources are spent, and fewer people are comfortable.
Process Loads
The architectural design community often cites a couple of key statistics to claim how this profession has an oversized impact on (and an oversized responsibility to respond to) climate change; (1) buildings contribute 40% of global greenhouse gas emissions; (2) buildings consume 70% of the electricity generated in the United States. What goes unsaid, however, is the majority of that consumption is associated with the human industry that happens within these buildings — the process loads. And the process loads of industrial project types dwarf all other sectors.
Thus, industrial process innovation and efficiency is a crucial area of opportunity for innovation. Even still, the AEC process rarely identifies process loads as an area for improvement. Apart from programmatic considerations, these industrial processes barely get any design attention. While industrial process design is an entirely separate discipline—and rightfully so—architecture and the built environment have a tremendous impact on these processes.This intersection is ripe for opportunity.
Integrative Design Services
Over the past ten years, much of my work has been focused on what I call democratizing the design process. I’ve worked hard to intentionally create moments when a wider variety and number of project stakeholders can engage with the design process. The motivation to do so is rooted in the diversity-stability hypothesis – an ecological framework that suggests that the more diverse a system is, the more resilient it is.
Resilience is the ability to recover quickly in response to a crisis. Considering we are living in an age of multiple crises, it is more critical than ever to focus on design strategies that increase the likelihood of resilient outcomes. Of all the approaches and tools I’ve experienced over the years, Integrative Design Process holds the most promise to do just that. It invites a diverse set of stakeholders into a critical stage of the design process where goals and project drivers are determined. These goals and drivers translate into tangible, measurable outcomes the design team can measure itself against throughout the entire project. The resulting environments are then inherently more resilient.
Further, research done on the topic predicts that teams that deploy the integrative design process and measure their goals throughout the project increase the performance of any given project by 50%. Anecdotally, my experience with project teams bears this out as well.
In short, the integrative design process enhances a project’s ability to adapt to crises, increases building performance, and—ultimately—helps the organizations’ operating within be more successful.
Foresight Trifecta
Those who know me best are well aware (much to their annoyance at times) that I am always on the hunt for synergy between my greatest passion, my expertise, and maximizing the value of my contributions. Maybe it is my Dutch heritage and the frugality that is associated with meager means. Maybe it is the urgency of the climate crisis and the significant and sustained bold action it demands. Maybe it is my experience with regenerative design where each design solution needs to solve multiple challenges at once – synergy.
When I was recently exploring what was next for me in my career, I discovered what the Foresight team was doing and I saw a tremendous opportunity. In partnership, there would be potential to amplify impact and solve complex, interdependent problems synergistically across multiple, often segregated, disciplines; (1) existing building operations and maintenance, (2) organizational process sustainability, and (3) new design and construction support (my expertise). Combined, the Foresight Trifecta.
In regenerative design, each solution needs to solve a large number of issues without creating its own unintended consequences. Teams need to be on the hunt for solutions that solve as many of the design challenges as possible without causing future problems to solve.
I believe with me now on the Foresight team, the collaborative opportunity to amplify impact within the built environment is unparalleled. We are well-positioned to leverage our complete skill set on an essential sector of the economy to accelerate sustainability and center human health and wellbeing in all that we do.