BLDG 2.0 | Crowd-Sourcing Building Energy Performance

BLDG 2.0 is a research project initiated by CASE, in partnership with New Buildings Institute, Arup Sustainability, SHoP Architects, Columbia University and IDEO. BLDG 2.0 will address two, somewhat paradoxical, barriers to informed sustainable design: the lack of publicly accessible performance data and the difficulty of extracting meaningful, consistent information from the raw, unstandardized data when it is available. BLDG 2.0 will move beyond this to create a real knowledge resource for building performance.

Inspired by the principles of mass collaboration and collective intelligence, BLDG 2.0 seeks to fill the void between design intent and verified building performance by providing an open-source analytical interface to building performance databases, a collaborative community of experts, and an online marketplace for ideas emphasizing building energy performance and open innovation. The steps to follow are simple to enumerate, but will take the concerted effort of our team and many others to set into motion.

· Make data accessible: BLDG 2.0 will utilize existing datasets compiled by members of our team and other contributing organizations, with an emphasis on identifying the data that is most useful for design teams. BLDG 2.0 will not seek to collect or store this data, but rather focus on providing the tools necessary to access and learn from it.    

· Provide an intuitive, yet extensible interface to the information: This will be the focus of the BLDG 2.0 team. Once the datasets have been identified, we will build an intuitive and open interface to view building performance data. While there have been several successful proprietary tools designed for this purpose, none of them can be built upon and extended by end-users. BLDG 2.0 will be designed with an Application Programming Interface (API) that will allow members of the BLDG 2.0 to enhance the functionality of the system for their own purposes and for use by others.    

· Create an open innovation network: The BLDG 2.0 platform will provide a community where new knowledge, technical information, insights and experiences are shared, debated and refined.

As an ever-evolving and improving collaborative infrastructure, BLDG 2.0 will provide a foundation for a more effective and adaptive community of design professionals dedicated to a sustainable built environment. As with the Human Genome Project, decentralized collaboration has the potential to yield new knowledge by harnessing the analytical power of the collective. This new knowledge will enable planners and designers to make more informed decisions, engineers to design more effective systems, manufacturers to develop better products, communities to adopt more ambitious policies, software companies to build more useful tools, owners to set higher standards and schools to better educate our future leaders.

Principal Investigators

Kirstin Weeks, Arup Sustainability
Steve Sanderson, CASE Design
Scott Marble, Columbia University GSAPP
Beau Trincia, IDEO
Mark Frankel, New Buildings Institute
Nash Hurley
Josh Emig, SHoP Architects