Parametric Sustainability Tool

While researching the construction sector and evaluating solutions for making the whole industry more sustainable, we identified the initial design phase as a key opportunity area. In various talks with different industry stakeholders and experts (architects, engineers, contractors), finding adequate sustainable solutions while designing and conceptualizing buildings was reported as a constant problem. Typically, initial plans often have negative effects on the sustainability of buildings, as well as the overall lifecycle costs.

While energy codes impose only slowly increasing requirements on new buildings, AEC experts find it more and more difficult to meet clients' construction budgets. As a result, there is less interest on both sides to build even more sustainable buildings than the energy codes require - stakeholders focus is on initial construction costs. As a result, more sustainable design options that would be more beneficial in the long run through energy savings are being overlooked.

Our construction-tech team's challenge was to create a desirable, viable and feasible solution concept for this pain point.

We came up with a solution concept for a tool, which calculates all possible design options and compares additional construction costs with long-term energy cost saving potential. 

Such a tool would make it easier for AEC experts and building planners to provide the client with several profound scenarios on the basis of which better design decisions can be done.

To make the tool accessible to all stakeholders, we decided that the programme should be a BIM based plug-in. (Building Information Modelling is a process for creating and managing information on a construction project across the project lifecycle and across all involved stakeholders.) To vote on the continuation of the project, we organised a do-or-die-session to discuss positive and negative aspects of the solution concept within the whole wattx team.

In terms of desirability, we estimated a market from which we could obtain significant shares. In addition we would enable our parent company Viessmann to gain access to the construction design process, in which the heaters for new buildings are specified. Last but not least, we would make the world a little bit more sustainable.

In general, our project was evaluated by our experts as technically feasible. However, we would not have all the necessary expertise in-house to start this project right away. Therefore, we are currently looking for partners (e.g. building physicists, facade specialists and BIM experts), who will take this project with us into the next phase with the goal of building an MVP. Our offer to potential partners is therefore to test assumptions and a collaboration in the course of a joint-hackathon. Contact Katja Leppler (katja@wattx.io) if interested.