resilience

Embedding robust yet accessible frameworks to evaluate ventilative cooling potential during the early/concept design stages for building practitioners can help in reducing the performance gap as well as avoiding vulnerability “lock-in” from design decisions that are based on poor or inadequate information. The challenge is to develop performance based evaluation methods that recognise the tacit approach to design in practice. Often design is iterative, non-linear and multi-agent.

The world is facing a rapid increase of air conditioning of buildings. This is driven by multiple factors, such as urbanisation and densification, climate change and elevated comfort expectations together with economic growth in hot and densely populated climate regions of the world. The trend towards cooling seems inexorable therefore it is mandatory to guide this development towards sustainable solutions.

Overheating in buildings has been identified as an essential cause of several problems ranging from thermal discomfort and productivity reduction to illness and death. Overheating in buildings is expected to increase as global warming continues. The risk of overheating in existing and new buildings can be reduced if policy makers take decisions about adaptation interventions quickly. This paper introduces a methodology for supporting such decisions on a national level.

Buildings and communities need to be more resilient in the face of increasing weather extremes due to climate change. Current building models lack adequate definition to address this new challenge. This paper defines resilient design in terms of four ecosystemic factors: robustness, redundancy, feedback and co-evolutionary adaptivity. It builds upon previous work on usability and extends this to include resilient performance in relation to three new UK case studies covering retrofit and new build housing. In each case usability studies are evaluated in terms of resilient design.