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S. Alsaadani:
"A mixed-methods exploration of non-technical barriers in collaboration for building performance simulation use in architectural decision-making";
Supervisor, Reviewer: C. Bleil De Souza, C. Tweed, A. Mahdavi; Cardiff University, 2013; oral examination: 2013-06-11.

It is widely proposed that building performance simulation (BPS) software holds massive potential for architects; enabling them to empirically assess the impacts of design decisions based on energy-efficiency and performance. However, migration of BPS into the architectural world has been superseded with barriers. The majority of barriers identified in the literature are of a technical nature; related to limitations in software and difficulties experienced by architects when they attempt to use BPS tools. Instead, many architects rely on the services of specialists in BPS (BPS specialists), and collaborate with them to inform design decision-making.

It is proposed in this thesis that alongside technical barriers, there may be additional non-technical barriers which arise when architects and BPS specialist sollaborate. The aim of this thesis is therefore to extract these potential non-technical barriers and explore how they may threaten to reduce the potential for BPS to inform design decision-making. To fulfil this aim, a pragmatic mixed-methods approach from the social sciences is devised; consisting of both qualitative and quantitative instruments.

The main findings of this thesis have been arrived at by integrating the outcomes of both qualitative and quantitative stages, and consist of some non-technical barriers to the England and Wales context. These include architects' negative attitudes toward BPS, architects perceiving the primary purpose of BPS to be for compliance, trust dynamics and stereotyping between architects and BPS specialists and ineffective communication between the two groups. These findings illustrate that non-technical barriers do exist, and can be extracted using the proposed methods. Novel additions to the body of knowledge made by this contribution include the findings themselves and the methodological approach used to arrive at these findings, highlighting the usefulness of social science research methods for future BPS research.