# The Power of Integrated Design in Green Building: A Deep Dive
## Introduction to Integrated Design
Integrated design is a transformative approach in the realm of architecture and construction, emphasizing collaboration among various professionals from the outset. This method ensures that all aspects of a project—architectural, structural, mechanical, electrical, landscaping—are considered together, leading to more cohesive and efficient outcomes.
## Understanding Integrated Design with Ann Edmonster
In a discussion with Ann Edmonster, integrated design is described as bringing together all disciplines involved in a project early and often. This collaborative effort allows for the exploration of synergies between different fields, ensuring that each professional understands how their work interacts with others'. This approach is crucial for achieving high-performance green buildings.
## Why Integrated Design Matters
Integrated design is not just a buzzword; it's essential for ambitious green building goals. Ann highlights that without integrated design, achieving such goals becomes harder. In custom homebuilding, where there are no prototypes to test ideas, integrated design ensures that all elements are considered from the start, avoiding costly mistakes later.
## Beyond Design: The Whole Construction Process
While the term "integrated design" is often associated with the design phase, it extends far beyond that. It encompasses the entire construction process, involving input from contractors and other construction professionals early on. This integration ensures that everyone's expertise is utilized effectively, leading to a more coordinated project.
## How Integrated Design Works in Practice
Integrated design can appear chaotic due to its collaborative nature, requiring revisiting decisions and hashing through major (and minor) design choices. This process, though initially disorganized, is more efficient in the long run. Unlike traditional linear processes where each discipline inherits problems from others, integrated design allows for early problem-solving, reducing inefficiencies.
## Integrated Design vs. Traditional Processes
In contrast to traditional sequential processes, integrated design encourages concurrent input from all parties. This approach prevents issues like inheriting problems created by previous stages, which is common in linear workflows. Instead, it fosters a holistic understanding of the project's requirements early on.
## The Cost Efficiency of Integrated Design
While integrated design may seem expensive due to its upfront investment in intellectual capital, it ultimately leads to higher-performing buildings. This efficiency is especially critical in construction, where costly fixes post-construction are inevitable without thorough planning. Learning and problem-solving during the design phase can save significant expenses later.
## Conclusion: The Future of Green Building
Integrated design's emphasis on collaboration and early input from all stakeholders is key to achieving high-performance green buildings. Despite initial challenges, its benefits in creating efficient, sustainable structures make it indispensable in modern construction. Embracing integrated design ensures that projects are not just built but optimized for the future.
"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enyou can go we're rolling well it's a beautiful morning here in Porto Valley California we're on a a job site that uh will turn out to be one of the greenest homes in this area and we're here with Ann Edmonster to talk a little bit about integrated design because integrated design is a key component of green building but Ann we hear the term a lot but what does integrated design mean to you when I think of integrated design I think of uh taking the opportunity to bring together all the disciplines involved in a project early and often so that um there are opportunities to explore synergies um between the disciplines to benefit from the knowledge and wisdom and experience of all the disciplines and perhaps above all for each discipline to understand how his or her work interacts with that of the other professionals so can you do a green building without integrated design oh that's a good question yeah I think you can it's just harder and and so we talked a little bit about why integrated design it sounds as though in terms of getting a home that's really high performance integrated design is is critical i think so i think the more ambitious your goals with respect to integrated or to green building the more important integrated design is because when you're building especially custom home like this one you're out there on the site you're not doing a prototype first this this is it and so you said when you're building I thought we were talking about integrated design is integrated design just about the design of the building or is it more about the whole construction process well it's interesting because integrated design is certainly the term we hear most often and generally that's held to mean the interactions among the design professionals so architect structural engineer mechanical engineer lighting electrical landscape and so on and so forth however integrated design is really a subset of a larger process an integrated planning process that spans from design all the way through to construction and ideally wraps in the construction disciplines as well because those are the folks who have to understand how to make the building come out of the ground and if their wisdom is fed in early on that's absolutely critical too so that's a little bit about the why of integrated design how do you actually accomplish it in a project how do you take and make it into um a whole thing because there's a lot of pieces right absolutely well this is an interesting part because um I've often observed that integrated design looks messy it requires a relatively high tolerance for something that may appear to be chaotic disorganized um may require revisiting decisions however my belief is that this seemingly disorganized chaotic process is actually the more efficient means to the end and it requires getting everybody in a room around a big table or some forum like that and really hashing through the major design decisions and often minor ones so um you know in a more conventional design process or planning process the architect conceives of the design hands off to the structural who figures out how to make it stand up the structural hands off or back to the architect then it's handed off to the mechanical who needs to figure out how to make the building comfortable it's handed off at some stage to an interior designer to the landscape designer each adding uh their work in sequence however often each discipline inherits problems created by the other and so their job is progressively to mediate the between those problems and so when you you you said an important thing which is that um it's it's it can be a linear process is there anything special about integrated design in building as opposed to integrated design in making a car no absolutely not in fact a big aha for me about integrated design was a couple of years after I had finished the stint chairing the leap for homes development process i realized oh that was an integrated design process we were developing a system or program but it's arguably universal to any design process but with buildings of course again you don't have the opportunity to prototype so you take your paper you go out in the field and you get one chance to get it right or make mistakes and very expensively remedy those mistakes so that's an interesting thing you said expense i mean this sounds integrated design sounds like a pretty expensive process well again I think it can be certainly there's more investment in the intellectual capital upfront but the point is to come out with a higher performing artifact the first time out of the gate again without the opportunity to prototype and iterate on the actual object that you're creating and so it's a heck of a lot less expensive to learn and problem solve with people's time before you're dealing with this stage of construction than it is to get this far and then think \"Oh gee we should have thought about X and we didn't we didn't work that out all the way.\" So and of course the higher your ambitions in terms of the green performance of a project the more crucial that is because you don't achieve efficiency or high levels of efficiency and performance by doing the same old things the same old ways so integrated design is important on big small homes and small homes this happens to be a rather large home but just as important to have integrated designyou can go we're rolling well it's a beautiful morning here in Porto Valley California we're on a a job site that uh will turn out to be one of the greenest homes in this area and we're here with Ann Edmonster to talk a little bit about integrated design because integrated design is a key component of green building but Ann we hear the term a lot but what does integrated design mean to you when I think of integrated design I think of uh taking the opportunity to bring together all the disciplines involved in a project early and often so that um there are opportunities to explore synergies um between the disciplines to benefit from the knowledge and wisdom and experience of all the disciplines and perhaps above all for each discipline to understand how his or her work interacts with that of the other professionals so can you do a green building without integrated design oh that's a good question yeah I think you can it's just harder and and so we talked a little bit about why integrated design it sounds as though in terms of getting a home that's really high performance integrated design is is critical i think so i think the more ambitious your goals with respect to integrated or to green building the more important integrated design is because when you're building especially custom home like this one you're out there on the site you're not doing a prototype first this this is it and so you said when you're building I thought we were talking about integrated design is integrated design just about the design of the building or is it more about the whole construction process well it's interesting because integrated design is certainly the term we hear most often and generally that's held to mean the interactions among the design professionals so architect structural engineer mechanical engineer lighting electrical landscape and so on and so forth however integrated design is really a subset of a larger process an integrated planning process that spans from design all the way through to construction and ideally wraps in the construction disciplines as well because those are the folks who have to understand how to make the building come out of the ground and if their wisdom is fed in early on that's absolutely critical too so that's a little bit about the why of integrated design how do you actually accomplish it in a project how do you take and make it into um a whole thing because there's a lot of pieces right absolutely well this is an interesting part because um I've often observed that integrated design looks messy it requires a relatively high tolerance for something that may appear to be chaotic disorganized um may require revisiting decisions however my belief is that this seemingly disorganized chaotic process is actually the more efficient means to the end and it requires getting everybody in a room around a big table or some forum like that and really hashing through the major design decisions and often minor ones so um you know in a more conventional design process or planning process the architect conceives of the design hands off to the structural who figures out how to make it stand up the structural hands off or back to the architect then it's handed off to the mechanical who needs to figure out how to make the building comfortable it's handed off at some stage to an interior designer to the landscape designer each adding uh their work in sequence however often each discipline inherits problems created by the other and so their job is progressively to mediate the between those problems and so when you you you said an important thing which is that um it's it's it can be a linear process is there anything special about integrated design in building as opposed to integrated design in making a car no absolutely not in fact a big aha for me about integrated design was a couple of years after I had finished the stint chairing the leap for homes development process i realized oh that was an integrated design process we were developing a system or program but it's arguably universal to any design process but with buildings of course again you don't have the opportunity to prototype so you take your paper you go out in the field and you get one chance to get it right or make mistakes and very expensively remedy those mistakes so that's an interesting thing you said expense i mean this sounds integrated design sounds like a pretty expensive process well again I think it can be certainly there's more investment in the intellectual capital upfront but the point is to come out with a higher performing artifact the first time out of the gate again without the opportunity to prototype and iterate on the actual object that you're creating and so it's a heck of a lot less expensive to learn and problem solve with people's time before you're dealing with this stage of construction than it is to get this far and then think \"Oh gee we should have thought about X and we didn't we didn't work that out all the way.\" So and of course the higher your ambitions in terms of the green performance of a project the more crucial that is because you don't achieve efficiency or high levels of efficiency and performance by doing the same old things the same old ways so integrated design is important on big small homes and small homes this happens to be a rather large home but just as important to have integrated design\n"
