Opportunities for AI to Improve Sustainable Building Design Processes

Sustainable building design is a complex social and technical process in which a broad range of stakeholders must construct and clearly communicate high quality design spaces. This paper summarizes recent assessments of current practice that illustrate how far industry today is from achieving this quality and clarity. Efforts to develop a platform of tools to address these limitations are discussed. PIP helps people communicate, share, and understand collaborative design processes; MACDADI helps project teams identify and manage rationale and consensus on decisions; Design Scenarios helps them generate requirements-driven alternative spaces, BIM, model-based analysis, and PIDO which helps to systematically assess these alternatives for their energy, daylight, structural, and cost impacts; and iRooms and the web, which help to communicate all of this information to engage designers, stakeholders, and decision makers in fast, multidisciplinary design and analysis processes. This new platform considerably improves the quality and clarity of AEC design spaces. However additional work would enable significant additional improvement. The paper concludes with a proposal for how AI might further improve the performance of this platform.