There will be a version of this available soon in a massively reduced format, but for those of you with a penchant for punishment, or perhaps just an unquenchable interest in my ability to drivel on for a hundred pages, here’s my Major study in all it’s pdf glory!

There is a figure of about 47 to 50%-ish but nobody references where they got this from, and nobody then subdivides it to show what that is made up of.

I’m on the bus at the moment, so i don’t really have access to the figures, but agriculture gets a big chunk, as does electricity generation, cement manufacturing gets a chunk, and transport gets a bit, and then the rest is left to ‘the built environment’.

As far as I can tell, if it has a roof, it is built environment. This means that that 50% that gets attributed to “something that architects really should be doing something about” includes everything from all the computers in offices around the country, to aluminium smelters (which consume so much electricity that they often have their own power station!).
What I’m after is the percentage of UK CO₂ emissions that are attributable to buildings, broken down into useful chunks. How much power does the building consume? To run the lifts, the HVAC, the lights?

There are a lot of grey areas here, like how much architects should get involved with specifying the IT infrastructure, so that it produces less heat, and therefore allows a reduction in cooling loads, but for the moment I just want simple numbers.

Does anyone have anything they can push my way? There’s a pint/mars bar in it for you!!

If you haven’t had a go:

BPquiz

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http://bpquiz.co.uk/

Carbon Buzz is a platform where people who design buildings can put their design stage building performance data from their simulations, and then compare it with real, in-use data. Check out the website, and there is the Carbon Buzz handbook too.

I’m interested in it for a number of reasons, mainly because it is one of the only chances in architecture where you get to see a comparison between design intent, and the delivered product. The apparent fact that the simulations are getting it so wildly wrong intrigues me too. If the designers of the simulations know that their calculations are so wrong, then why are they still used, hopefully Judit can shed some light on this!

Since the interview was organised the project has been funded for another three years by the Technology Strategy Board, so we’ll get to see a continuation of this work.

If you have any questions that you’d like me to ask Judit then put them into the comments on this post. I’ll publish the interview in a few days once it is edited.

I thought I’d start building the results graphs so that you can see how they are starting to form.

For starters, here’s a map of who has taken the quiz so far (as of today Thursday). As usual wordpress won’t allow me to do anything fun, so if you click on the picture below it’ll take you to the bpquiz proto-blog.

This one shows the aggregate confidences assigned to the questions (the red bars) next to the marked responses (the blue bars)

It is interesting to see how they differ on a few questions, but also how well correlated they are too in general. I was expecting to see a more pronounced difference.

There are plenty more graphs coming up when my sanity and enthusiasm for graphs allows!

Finally, if you’ve done the quiz, and you feel bad for not getting too many right, don’t! The average score is currently about 44%, so you probably did better than you think.

If you haven’t done the quiz yet, then get over to http://bpquiz.co.uk/ and have a go!

There have been a lot of long nights of faffing about with learning about the technology that runs the internet, But now the building performance quiz is live, working reasonably well in most browsers, and has started producing results!

So “what is it?” I hear you ask!

There are a couple of reasons that I can’t tell you everything about it just yet. But for now it is a quiz that shows up what you know and don’t know about designing for building performance within the emerging low carbon economy.

The key thing is that a lot of people have a go at the quiz, so if you have a screen, and some time, then please do it, and if you have all of the above, and friends, then send it to all of them and beg them to do it too. Please!!!

have a go!

BPquiz.co.uk

Designers make decisions about what to do based on what they know. So what happens if they know wrong?

The ability to ‘know thyself‘ can be described in modern parlance as calibration. This skill varies greatly per person across all their activities i.e. I may be very well calibrated about my ability to complete a particular grade of climb, but very poorly calibrated about the length of time to complete a list of features in a spreadsheet.

This becomes important when making a decision about something really important. If you are over confident, then you might make some really big mistakes!

I’ve started testing my calibration on some real events using Prediction Book, it’ll be really interesting to see how well insulated from reality I actually am! Log in and make some predictions of your own and lets pump up the amount of data available to munch through!

This seems pretty analogous to my major study. The temptation to splurge my brain across the pages and indulge all my ideas to an equal amount is overwhelming. Luckily for the blog, that doesn’t bother me, if people want to read this stream of drivel, then good for them, if not, then I don’t really mind. Unfortunately for a marked piece of work I need to toe the line a bit.

I’ve started collecting my reading material in a more structured way using Mendeley, which is a reference collection tool with a bit of social networking thrown in.

This is the list as it stands (it’s embedded, so it’ll change)