14
Mar
2010
Carbon Buzz interview
On Monday I’m going to go and interview Judit Kimpian about her involvement in the Carbon Buzz project.
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.
11
Mar
2010
BP Quiz gets going
The bpQuiz site is up and rolling along nicely.
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!
9
Mar
2010
building performance quiz
Finally it is launched!!
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!
26
Dec
2009
Prediction Book
Through some bizzaro twist of fate my major study has stopped being about the future of the whole world, and has focused in quite a lot. I’ll post about this a bit more later on, but as a very quick explanation of what I’m on about…
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!
26
Dec
2009
collected reading
All the advice about how to make a blog readable and interesting is about focusing in on what you are going to talk about and if you really must talk about a load of things, have several blogs.
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)