Sustainable building design in practice – survey among Danish DGNB consultants

Sustainability certification schemes experience grooving popularity. Few years ago, Denmark got its own sustainability certification scheme based on the German DGNB certification scheme run by Green Building Council Denmark. Investigations of the design processes underlying four Danish DGNB certified healthcare centers show that the architectural design has been taken too fare in the initial phases without analysing and documenting several DGNB criteria. It creates a “point of no return”, which means it is not possible to prioritise the assessment points in the certifications scheme when needed. Further, it confirms the importance of multidisciplinary collaboration, including the DGNB consultant, from the early design stages. The research suggests further investigations of challenges regarding design process and decision-making on a more common level to verify the findings on a more general level.
The objective of the study presented in this paper, is to investigate the challenges related to the design process experienced by practice when designing sustainable buildings using the Danish DGNB certification scheme. Questionnaires are sent to all Danish DGNB consultant and auditors to be able to cover a wide variety of projects and level of experience with the DGNB scheme.
The preliminary results show that DGNB projects require a large amount of documentation and the design process requires a large amount of manual data input in different tools handles by different stakeholders, e.g. tools for calculating life-cycle assessment, energy use and daylight etc. Furthermore, the study discovers a need for developing methodologies and tools to support the initial design phases securing an iterative design process and decision-making on sufficient level of knowledge.