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This is the first in what I hope will be a series of interviews with people who I think have something to say, and are worth listening to.

There is a full transcript, with as many hyperlinks as could find after the fold.

BD: I’m here with Judit Kimpian, who is head of advanced modelling and sustainability at Aedas and she’s going to talk about the Carbon Buzz project, which she’s been involved with since its inception.

Judit did her PhD in Architecture at the rca, and it was the first PhD at the rca, in architecture wasn’t it?

JK: No, there were a few other PhDs, but this was the first project based PhD

BD: Ah ok

JK: In fact it was the first project based PhD in architecture in the UK as far as I know. Although there are some competing entities from the Bartlett.

BD: Shall we talk about how Carbon Buzz started?

JK: I joined Aedas about 5 years ago and I realised shortly after that the practice wasn’t making the most of its talent within the practice in terms of sustainable design, there was a lot of knowledge about, but we weren’t really doing anything to gather that knowledge and to learn from each other’s experiences. And with a very fast moving field we actually needed a cohesive strategy to keep on top of the issues, and in fact to keep ahead of the curve really.

And one of the things I felt very strongly about is recording the project data, i.e. understanding what our operations are in terms of CO₂ emissions, but also understanding what our projects are doing. Then after our first audit we realised that our footprint in terms of our operations is really a fraction of our projects. Our projects actually stay in place and continue to emit so the emmisioins from the projects we design and construct are cumulative as opposed to our operations.

BD: So that was an emissions audit on the practice’s operations, and then the projects?

JK: and then the projects. And through this audit I also realised that although we had quite a bit of data on the forecast emissions in the form of part L calculations or other forecasts, we actually had very little data on what our projects are doing once they are in use. That was a bit of a revalation for be because if you look at any other product design field or consultancy, the knowledge of how your products function in use is one of the most precious bits of knowledge that you can gain.

BD:   When exposed to real users?

JK: Exactly, so from cars to mobile telephones to computers, everyone is really keen to follow up on what their projects actually do once… over what they designed – how the designs perform in practice. And architects are really missing out on this opportunity by photographing their projects when they are complete but actually never going back and visiting them in use.

BD: So how did this revelation plus audit turn into Carbon Buzz?

JK: It’s a good question. We were doing a project funded by Urban Buzz, and I was really struggling with benchmarking, I really wanted to understand at the time that if I have some forecast values how do I actually tell if my project is any good, or not very good in terms of CO₂ emissions? And at the time cibse were developing the new benchmarks for the display energy certification, and that’s kind of a whole different story -  the display energy certificates were the first regulatory framework which went after real energy consumption, as opposed to everything else which was always percentage saving against a notion building and that makes a big difference. So once you are talking about real emissions i.e. what does your building emit in terms of CO₂ per metre squared per year and then there is a real number attached to that, it suddenly makes the whole problem palpable.

So how did this become Carbon Buzz? Well, just talking to my friends in different practices across London, I realised that I wasn’t the only one struggling with the notion of benchmarking. So what happened was, we were doing an Urban Buzz funded project, procured by ucl (University College London) who was running the funding scheme, which was part of a knowledge sharing program. One evening I was having a conversation with Alan Penn, who has since, interestingly enough, become the dean of University College London, and I said “Well Alan, I think a lot of people are struggling with the idea of benchmarking CO₂ emissions in the industry, why don’t we put together a platform to allow people to put their data online, and let’s do it anonymously because people may feel tetchy about sharing their own data, and it might be difficult because they have to ask permission from clients, and there are liability issues, so anonymously would be the best, and we could maybe compel people to publish projects through Carbon Buzz”, and Alan said “so why don’t you have a chat with Harry Bruhns from ucl, and Harry promptly said, when I sent him the idea, he said “Hmm, interesting idea, but very poorly thought out, Judit, you’d better get your act together and write it properly” and so Harry said “Interesting idea, but you’d better write it up properly” so I gave it a shot, and then harry put me in touch with Bill Bordass, and we started having quite a dynamic conversation about the topic and applied for further funding, and we got fifty grand from Urban Buzz to develop the project.

BD: Who’s Bill?

JK: Bill Bordass? Bill Bordass started the Usable Buildings Trust, I can’t tell you how many years ago, but quite a few years ago (more than twenty I think, so in that sort of range). And he is the one person in the United Kingdom who really knows, at least from my experience – there is really hardly anything you can’t ask Bill in terms of CO₂ emissions of buildings in operation. And Bill had a very formative role in the development of the cibse benchmarks along with Hywel Davies from cibse and Harry Bruhns from ucl.

So I was getting the sense that I was definitely with the right expert group of people. And it was actually a real privilege to work with them over the years. I was just telling someone today how that actually happened, where basically I come up with these daft ideas about what we should be doing as architects, and why don’t we do it, it seems so obvious, and then they promptly tell me why we don’t do that, and then we try and find a way around it, and it’s been a very humbling experience, but incredibly enlightening. In the process we ended up being the designers of the platform, along with my colleague Eleanor, Eleanor Davies. We persuaded the riba and cibse to come onboard and support the effort, which they – amazingly – did, and it was actually the first cibse-riba project that was a shared project between the two institutions and the bre offered to build the website.

BD: So, apart from those people, who else was involved?

JK: We wanted to share out the workload so that we had small architectural practices as well as large practices, small engineers and large engineers. I was working quite a bit with XCO₂ developing our practice strategy, and they were effectively a small sustainability consultancy, and they were very helpful and supportive. Fielden Clegg Bradley, Bill Gething was incredibly supportive throughout, and he was the sustainability champion for the riba at the time. hok; DrMM, Alex De Rijke; Atelier 10; Sheppard Robson; Make architects; Mott MacDonald; Hamiltons; Faber Maunsel; bdp; were the initial core group. What we did was we developed some content, then we developed a story board, the bre then implemented it as a specification which we then piloted with the group, and everybody tried to break it – and we often managed. Then we built broader piloting workshops, and hence the site was born

BD: How was it received on launch?

JK: It was a very impressive audience at the launch in fact, and the media, especially the architecture media was excited about the project. Having a project where services where services engineers were collaborating with architects on something graphic, and easy to understand, it was easy. I think all the people who participated in the workshops really took something away with them, that was the knowledge that everybody was keen to have.

BD: It was launched through a series of workshops wasn’t it?

JK: That’s right, at the riba and the Building Centre.

BD: So a lot of people came a long and used the system, and the general understanding was that people enjoyed it, people thought that it was a worthwhile thing?

JK: I was quite surprised by the audience for the workshops, or the participants in the workshops they were sort of my age people, they were really dynamic and very bright, and I never really thought that data could be so interesting to people that were actually so interesting themselves.

So that was good, and obviously the attracted more people, and before we knew it from an initial thirty, we were up to sixty odd users, and within a year we were well over a hundred and fifty, even though in that time we had no more funding for the maintenance of the site. So we spent the next year grearing up for the next round of funding.

BD: So, how long has it been going now?

JK: it was launched in November 2008.

BD: So after all that time now, in retrospect, has it been useful? What’s it for? Has it been helpful at all to people, or is it still waiting to be useful?

JK: We’ve done an online survey, just before the tsb funding stream, and we got quite a bit of feedback from people. Some people seem to be using it all the time as part of their practice procedure, we do it, definitely, at Aedas, and for me it’s been extremely useful for me personally, and I think perhaps for other people as well -  there are two basic things that the site does – it helps you represent energy consumption in a very simple and easy to interpret way, that also suggests what sort of questions that you might want to ask of a services engineer, which architects are always a bit shy about. And the second one is obviously helping to contrast forecast energy use versus actual energy consumption, and if you think about the two bits of regulation that relate to this, it’s the energy performance certificates, which are the epcs, and the Display Energy Certificates which are the decs. The epcs, they describe energy consumption, again, the same way, as a percentage saving.

BD: Tickboxes?

JK: It’s not so much tick boxes, but it’s based on the analysis procedures we use to forecast energy consumption, hence they miss a very large bulk of real energy consumption that’s related to user behaviour. So we drafted a big graph which, the graph itself became quite popular because it showed that you start with a part L calculation, and on top of that comes the unregulated energy use – which is everything that people plug into the wall – and on top of that comes any special function that people add to a building, like a cafeteria, or some ovens, or schools or kilns, or a trading floor for a prestigious office block, which all bring huge repercussions, and then things like the building management systems, so who, and with what expertise, is looking after that system, lots of things depend on that. Also the occupancy, so we design buildings to have a certain kind of occupancy and operating hours, and those tend to distort really quite drastically during a buildings life, and we actually don’t really design buildings for that sort of resilience. Which is a shame, and essentially the result of this is that the way we design buildings as a profession completely overlooks the majority of the energy consumption for buildings in use, and that’s an incredible lost opportunity for the industry.

So Carbon Buzz is able to highlight these discrepancies, and make it very obvious and easy to read

BD: Looking at the graphs on the front page of the webisite it shows that a lot of the predicted energy usages are significantly lower than the in-use energy use. Has that had any effect on people, have they started to revise their models, or reassess why that is?

JK: There has been a lot of work on that, and, you know, the new version of part L is due out, and the crcs, the UK Carbon Reduction Commitment is beginning to focus on actual energy consumption rather than relative savings. And the Display Energy Certificates have become mandatory for all public buildings, and the government is now thinking about rolling those out for the entire building stock (non domestic building stock), which would be really fantastic. And in fact, people from the property industry that I have had discussions with, they all seem to rely on display energy certificates to a greater extent that epcs when it comes to managing their stock, which is a really great thing to hear. Carbon Buzz is really one of the few platforms that are really built on actual, real energy consumption rather than forecasts.

BD: Is there any work that you’ve done on why it doesn’t seem to be the norm for architects to go back and do post occupancy evaluations and just general studies of their buildings when it seems to be such the norm in other industries?

JK: Well, we haven’t, but we’ve actually got and EngD student starting work with us in the next few months whose main area of interest will be post occupancy evaluations, and how we can do them better, perhaps somewhat more interestingly, I think I have done over 52 presentations on CO₂ management over the last year or so, and I do always ask whoever the audience is (that doesn’t mean that it was always a hundred people, so sometimes it is just three of four people from various entities), and I haven’t once encountered a group that knew how to measure CO₂ emissions, were aware of the cibse benchmarks, and had a rough idea of why one being more or less efficient in terms of energy consumption, so how does a school compare to a swimming pool ? How does an office building compare to a supermarket?

BD: So is this information that has become available probably since these people have left education?

JK: Which information?

BD: Knowledge about the cibse benchmarks, and how to measure CO₂ emissions?

JK: The cibse benchmarks form the backbone of the display energy certificates, so that was rolled out in 2008.

BD: Why do you think that people, who are in an industry that is supposed to know about this, don’t? Is that a failing of the industry, or is because it’s not fashionable to know it?

JK: I don’t think people really appreciate, anywhere in the world, what role energy plays in our lives, and CO₂ emissions have been a really easy way to visualise how much we need energy, and how much we rely on cheap energy, and should energy prices rise really drastically, we would have to rethink a lot of things in the way in which we live. I think because it’s invisible, people don’t really understand its link to everything that we do, and tend to underestimate its importance. Architects haven’t, in the past, thought about designing with it because it hasn’t been a part of their thinking.

It’s always been something in the realm of engineering rather than architecture, and also architects, at least, I can definitely speak for myself, we have a short attention span, and we are very visual people, and we prefer to be communicating, even data, in very visual ways, when they see numbers and symbols, people just blank out.

BD: So traditionally really famous architects would have been characterised by their spectacular ability to design with light, so now it’d be spectacular ability to design with energy?

JK: No matter how important energy is, it isn’t the only thing about buildings, because we use materials, so we use energy to put materials together and then light and heat them, and then do things in that space. So the energy consumption of the supply chain is equally important, and the environmental impact of the supply chain is perhaps even more important, to the overall environmental impact, so it’s not just the energy consumption, but it’s pollution , and water consumption, and urban impact, and well being, and health, and just general quality life.

BD: So now we are starting to take these much greater areas of quality into consideration, we can measure quality in a very much wider way than we would have traditionally, do you think that the role of consultants and other groups will become more important, or will architects take on more, or will it be a sort of blurring of the boundaries between the two?

JK: I think one of the most interesting parts of this research was its collaborative nature. So people from different parts of the industry, usually in their independent knowledge silos come together and decide to solve a problem, and I think that’s really great. We’ve done that on other projects as well, where the outcome was really quite spectacular. I definitely think it’s kind of a low hanging fruit, there is so much opportunity for innovation there that we’d be crazy not to do it, and actually Aedas had been really supportive of this approach.

BD: And how would somebody with less experience with collaborating with other fields know who an appropriate group of people to bring together would be?

JK: I don’t want to go on about the benefits of Carbon Buzz, but if you try using Carbon Buzz once or twice, it will inevitably help you think in a certain way that will know what to ask from your consultant. Architects don’t have to do the analysis themselves, but the definitely have to understand what impact their design will have on the overall energy profile of a building, and I do think that carbon buzz helps people ask the right questions, and if the consultants are unhappy or unwilling to answer them then you should definitely work with a different consultant. The consultants, in my experience, actually really enjoy the architects asking them good questions about what works and what doesn’t work, but I may have a very sheltered and spoiled life!

BD: Just talking about the benefits of Carbon Buzz, I wanted to congratulate you on getting a further three years of funding for it – who’s funded it?

JK: Well, the main bulk of the funding comes from the Technology Strategy Board.

BD: and who are they?

JK: The Technology Strategy Board is a government body that provides funding, and there was a call for low carbon building, and we applied, and we got though the first round, and we got though the second round, and that was that!

It’s a 50:50, 50% funding, as with all government funding, and the rest of the funding was put up by the bre, by Aedas, by Aecom, Davis Langdon, and all the previous partners, Fielden Clegg, XCO₂, the riba and cibse, and so we’ve got really quite a bit of funding to develop the. Currently it is a beta platform, so the next six months we are going to spend upgrading fhe functionality so that it is quicker, it’s a bit easier to use, and it links to a bit more knowledge, or it highlights links more actively to users.

BD: So how does the ‘carbon conscious practice’ fit into the Carbon Buzz Platform?

JK: It’s a three year program of tsb funding, and beyond the first six months, we are then going to develop quite a few more features to allow the database to grow in size, and offer more functionality to a broader group of users. The riba comes recognises that having more data in the public domain is incredibly useful, so it invites practices to publish data through the Carbon Buzz site, and publishing practices will be recognised as carbon conscious practices by the Royal Institute of British Architects. They are also considering perhaps requesting people submitting, for example, for sustainability awards to provide the data that they would otherwise provide for Carbon Buzz website. The riba has really been incredibly supportive in getting the project off the ground, and continued to support it though their research and practice.

BD: Where do you see Carbon Buzz going once that three years is over? If you want to make a long range prediction about where it’s going to be.

JK: One of the big challenges for any non profit platform is how to maintain itself in the long run, how to keep growing and develop to provide services to users that are cutting edge.

So through this tsb funding we have devised certain services that the Carbon Buzz platform could provide to the paying customer, and so hopefully by the end of the three years we will have enough data in the database, and enough partners on board to expand the scope of the database, and actually offer a service for others to others to be able to benchmark larger portfolios, comply with crc requirements, and even analyse the database for various trends and get specialist trend reports from the site.

The focus is still to provide a free benchmarking service to designers and operators, and services engineers in terms of benchmarking, and allowing people to track their own projects for free, and that’s very important.

BD: Is there anything else that you want to say about it that we haven’t covered?

JK: Come and try it!

BD: Thank you very much, it’s been enlightening!

JK: Thank you.