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VIEWS


External pressures like the Building Safety Act and the Golden Thread will help bring in a better culture of data creation, storage and management on projects


At HTA we have begun the task of capturing data on our projects and monitoring this over time. It’s a slow but valuable effort that will take time to bear fruit, and perhaps that is part of the problem with design data. We are all guilty of having a short attention span related to the design life of buildings and the task of data collection is a long-term one more related to the place. When buildings are completed, everyone related to a project moves on and there is little emphasis on collecting data or feedback.


Because there is very little activity to collect data on completed projects, the profession runs the risk of designing and constructing buildings that have the same mistakes in them as the last generation’s version. Where we should aim to get to, collectively, is an evidence base on the successes of our schemes, as well as feedback on the things that didn’t work so well. There are good reasons to collect positive and negative feedback, as positive data tells us what is working and can be used to provide an evidence base to reinforce reasons for repeating something. External pressures like the Building


Safety Act and the Golden Thread will help to bring in a better culture of data creation, storage and management on design projects, and this will eventually feed into the systems of clients who manage portfolios of buildings. Designers are increasingly being asked to provide data to enable investors to make comparisons between assets in different countries and under different jurisdictions. In an international market, data may become the currency that enables designers to compare themselves to the competition overseas.


There are many sound environmental reasons for the collection of data on buildings, as too often decisions are made based on aspirations rather than evidence. In my career we have gone through several cycles of silver bullets that would solve the


WWW.ARCHITECTSDATAFILE.CO.UK


environmental crisis, from biomass boilers, to Combined Heat and Power systems and fi nally arriving at heat pumps. Perhaps if there had been some better data at the beginning of all of this, we might have got to the answer quicker?


The growth of data around embodied carbon in construction is another case in point, and there are now a number of tools available for the industry to use based on large datasets, enabling evidence-based decision making. But is the data based on enough information, is there a good evidence base? We also have the arrival of AI to complicate the situation. For it to participate in the effort of design it needs training data, ideally data covering the performance of buildings that work well


Cane Hill in Coulsdon, another site where HTA is collecting resident satisfaction data


for their occupants, owners, society and the environment. That way, anyone who trains AI on design data that is available will do so knowing that they aren’t going to repeat the mistakes of the past. The alternative is quite frightening, there is a real prospect of untrained users using AI-based tools to design buildings cheaply that repeat the mistakes of the past. Would you like a McMansion? Of course – here it is, or perhaps you would like a version of a French 18th century chateau? No problem. Lets try and work together to provide the data that the future generation of designers need to ensure that the future is utopian – rather than dystopian.


Rory Bergin is partner, sustainable futures at HTA Design


ADF MARCH 2024


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