Carbon Artifacts: a socio-material approach to low and net zero carbon building design from concept to handover

Delivery of net-zero carbon buildings is a critical and urgent component of UK legal obligation to achieve net zero carbon emissions by 2050 (BEIS, 2019a). The construction sector represents 10% of UK carbon emissions and directly influences 47% of all national emissions (NFB, 2019). While there has been significant technical progress, the UK building stock remains one of the most energy inefficient in Europe and the Government is not on-track to meeting its decarbonisation goals (BEIS, 2019). Most research into this 'performance gap' focuses on either technical problems and solutions (De Wilde, 2014) or on the promise of new integrator roles (Parag and Janda, 2014), with little discussion of the professional and organisational issues that challenge the delivery of net zero carbon buildings.

The current organisational structure of projects has direct implications for the delivery of low and net-zero-carbon buildings. Construction projects are temporary organisations, involving multiple disciplines, multiple firms and multiple phases - each with its own teams and extensive sub-contracting (Winch, 1998). Organisational boundaries shape who participates in the specification of design problems and solutions and their transmission across project teams and phases. They also establish who is accountable for particular targets and who is not. When faced with a new task, professionals often sub-contract work out to a team of specialists with no awareness or responsibility for the design as a whole. The result is that solutions developed at one moment in time are not fully understood, as they are passed from one phase to another and carbon targets often fall off the agenda.

The proposed research explores these effects by examining the initial development and ongoing modification of carbon reduction design solutions in six cases of new and retrofit commercial buildings. Commercial buildings tend to be bespoke, making the formulation and communication of solutions across organisational boundaries all the more critical. The research will be developed in dialogue with industry partners involved in these six cases. Special attention will be paid to the way in which design solutions are embedded in visual representations and physical artifacts, which are subsequently re-interpreted and modified.

Findings resulting from this novel approach promise to contribute targeted guidance for the development of net-zero carbon buildings, the organisational and professional capability development of firms, professional training and educational curriculum. Together researchers and upwards of 30 industry partners, involved in six projects, will explore the effect of organisational boundaries on the delivery of low and net zero carbon buildings, revise firm-level protocols and develop capacity. In addition, the project will contribute to policy and professional guidance for net-zero carbon building, to teaching case studies for use in HE and CPD training and to a climate change and de-carbonisation educational management framework for built environment curricula, currently under development by the Climate Curriculum Project. By focusing on teams of sustainable minded professionals with a history of working together and professed commitments to carbon reduction, the research also provides an opportunity to capture, further develop and diffuse good practice.