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I. Kovacic, M. Sreckovic:
"Designing the planning process for sustainable buildings: from experiment towards implementation";
Engineering Project Organization Journal, 3 (2013), 1; 51 - 63.

Buildings play a crucial role in the achievement of sustainability aims, due to the large energy consumption for operation and the related CO2 production rate. Generally prescriptive-normative strategies are being used for the increase of building performance in terms of energy efficiency. The focus is mainly upon the development and implementation of new technologies for energy-efficient building services and hull together with the improvement of calculation methods. Little effort has been invested into the rethinking of the design and planning process for sustainable buildings which are still planned in a traditional manner, where planning tasks are broken down into sequenced, highly specialized disciplines. The practitioners are aware of the need for a paradigm change in the planning culture and are asking for methods towards a more integrated, collaborative planning practice. We argue that for the achievement of sustainability aims more than energy-efficient technologies coupled with a prescriptive strategy are necessary, and we advocate a shift towards people (the planning-processstakeholders)as carriers of sustainability. This paper focuses on the development of a holistic, life-cycle oriented planning strategy, which enables knowledge transfer from phase to phase, as well as the creation of common new
knowledge. Critical herewith is the collaboration of all planning-process stakeholders (planners, users, managers) from the early planning phases on, since those are crucial for the latter building performance. In order to identify and evaluate the advantages of the integrated planning practice, we have conducted a role-playing experiment simulating integrated and sequential planning processes for an energy-efficient structure. The experiment was part of a research project Co_Be (Cost Benefits of Integrated Planning) at the Vienna University of Technology. The experiment identified efficiency, team- and process-satisfaction, as well as more balanced stress and conflict levels of the integrated planning teams as significant advantages of this treatment. The results of the experiment were verified within the stakeholder feedback-workshop with practitioners. There the need for the development of mechanisms supporting the design of inter-disciplinary communication and knowledge creation as well as knowledge management within the integrated planning processes, was identified.

Energy-efficient buildings, exploratory research, integrated planning, knowledge transfer, project organizations

http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/21573727.2012.760155