Sustainable Futures

Rethinking Bioclimatic Design

Designing buildings for human health and comfort is complicated — It doesn’t have to be.

Photo by CHUTTERSNAP on Unsplash

The Art of Bioclimatic Design

Combining “climate” and “biology’’, “bioclimatic design” focuses on building design driven by the local climate. Recent advances in Bioclimatic design focuses on developing new knowledge, analysis, and actions on identifying passive (strategies) design potentials of a given site governed by the local climate conditions to offer a comfortable indoor environment sustainably.

Bioclimatic charts are often used in building design to inform designers about the climatological regime for a given location. This includes diurnal and seasonal variations, and also highlighting possibilities for improving occupant comfort through environmentally-oriented design strategies.

A typical bioclimatic chart highlighting climate based passive potentials (Košir, Mitja. “Bioclimatic Potential — A Way to Determine Climate Adaptability.” In Climate Adaptability of Buildings: Bioclimatic Design in the Light of Climate Change, edited by Mitja Košir, 117–39. Cham: Springer International Publishing, 2019. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-18456-8_4.)

Evolution of Bioclimatic Charts

Over the years, many studies have focused on different strategies for developing bio-climatic charts:

Table 1: Summary of bioclimatic design approaches over the years

In each attempt to devise the best bio-climatic chart, researchers rely on current meteorological data to statically assess the potential of passive techniques. There have also been a few attempts to quantify passive potential using an online interactive tool that considers the adaptive comfort model of users, such as Andrew Marsh’s psychrometric chart. It’s worth noting the assumptions and constraints of each of these approaches can expand or limit the range of potential strategies available to a designer.

Andrew Marsh’s psychrometric chart - showcasing and quantifying passive potentials (https://drajmarsh.bitbucket.io/psychro-chart2d.html)

Too Crude for Designers

In my role as an Urban Informatics Engineer at Digital Blue Foam, I believe we need to simplify how we highlighting such insights to designers, especially during the early design phase where the design space is loosely constrained.

I believe we need to simplify how we highlight such insights to designers, especially during the early design phase where the design space is loosely constrained.

Generally speaking, bioclimatic charts help us identify basic building physics approaches to push them out of the comfort points into the comfort zone defined by the bioclimatic chart. However, until now, bioclimatic charts have been too crude to be fully adapted to the complexities of the passive design.

What’s Next?

Currently, our team is re-imaging the paradigm bioclimatic charts to better support how designers to inform the way building designs are adapted to climate. Here are 5 ways we hope to move past the current approach to bioclimatic design towards a way of modularizing climate-driven design options as a catalog of recommendations:

1. Visualizing climatic potential by imposing design and massing constraints based on passive strategy utilization targets.
2. Developing ratings and indices to model possible design strategies.
3. Incorporating multi-criteria optimization of passive strategies.
4. Adopting an adaptive comfort models to quantify comfort and establish comfort zones that should also include the user’s perception of comfort.
5. Providing interactive bioclimatic visualizations of implementing the passive technique can be linked to actual cost savings and carbon emissions reduction.

DBF’s web-based engine with data mining capabilities (http://www.digitalbluefoam.com/)

Conclusion

In this post, we discuss the need for bioclimatic design tools to overcome current limitations to be more responsive to the design process. In our work, we foresee a shift in current bioclimatic design tools, from one-time, site-based climate visualizations, to hands-on, interactive systems for real-time design support. Recommendations for improving comfort through highlighted passive strategies must be represented in a more user-friendly way for designers to foresee and implement on the ground.

N O T E S

1 Bioclimatic Design by USGBC. https://www.usgbc.org/articles/bioclimatic-design

2 Can Bioclimatic Design Reduce Air-Conditioning Requirements? https://sourceable.net/can-bioclimatic-design-reduce-air-conditioning-requirements/

Images and Video by Authors

About the Author

Dr. Ramanathan Subramanian works as an Urban Informatics Engineer with Digital Blue Foam (DBF), a SaaS company dedicated to accelerate the world’s transition to better, more sustainable cities. Building energy modelling, outdoor comfort analysis, design exploration, and sustainable solutions for the energy-environment nexus are among his research interests. He has over 8 years of experience as a researcher in the field of sustainable architecture, with publications in journals and conferences.

About Digital Blue Foam

Digital Blue Foam (DBF) comprises an elite mix of designers and technologists from around the world who share a strong commitment for empowering a revolution in architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC) industries toward carbon-negative projects by leveraging data-driven, AI-powered, collaborative, and sustainable approaches. We embrace collaboration and sponsorship, and we thrive at offering customized solutions that make designing a hassle-free and intuitive process. To learn more about Digital Blue Foam, visit our website.