Facilitating Sustainable Building: turning observation into practice

Facilitating ‘green’ building: turning observation into practice

Abstract

This thesis is the story of my five year journey developing a practice in integrating ‘green’ innovation within the built environment—mainly in new buildings.

It is an exploratory thesis based on qualitative observation and documentation of my experience and detailed reflection on the successes and failures of this practice as I moved from naïve novice to expert.

Initially I identified a great deal of desk-based and survey research on ‘green’ buildings, but little research actually looking at the field from within the practice of a building project. I thought that exploring this would create some understanding of why some ‘green’ initiatives were not taken up at the rate many people expected.

Through the telling of the over fifty stories which make up this thesis, I hope that I can create vicarious experiences in readers thus enabling them to use my journey to reflect on their own paths and to therefore learn with me.

A number of useful tools and methods I developed to support my practice are presented, along with the key insights I extracted from my experience: that different types of ‘green’ information are relevant at particular stages of the building life cycle; that reflective practice is an essential tool in a facilitative practice working in a discursive, dynamic and complex field; that the power, culture and nature of the agents play a role in the ability to successfully integrate ‘green’ innovation; and, most importantly, that there is a need for all agents to have a voice in the integration of ‘green’ innovation into a project.