Data helps us to close the performance gap and make sure buildings perform as well as, or even better than, they do in the design stage.

I don’t know whether you have ever made a non-Newtonian fluid by mixing cornflour with water?As soon as you try to move the fluid its viscosity rises exponentially; in fact, people have walked across swimming pools of the stuff.. For me, both the Devil’s Snare and the cornflour explain one of the key reasons why we fail in doing the great things we are all capable of.

We become wedded to one way of doing them and when we don’t get the results we want, we think we just need to try harder, to struggle more or to do more work.The results are the opposite to what we expect.. You can see this all around us in the season of festivities.We all have our own playbook, a list of traditions, menu, set of rituals.

If doing these things doesn’t make everybody happy we just need to do more of them, try harder, and put more effort in.. We get caught in the Devil’s Snare.. As Hermione Granger knew, the alternative is to stop struggling and bring light to where we are.One of the play-on-words used by counsellors is not to say “Don’t sit there, do something” but to say “.

Don’t do something, sit there.

This is a time of year, but also a time in our history when the things we have been doing and are doing are not giving us what we want and need.So our chances of finding the optimum solution are increased when compared to more linear design approaches..

There are four principles that enable us to operate in this way:.A common language allows people with diverse areas of expertise, including those not normally involved in design and construction, to participate fully in design decisions.

This is much more effective than a conventional approach where you might produce engineering drawings or documentation and then hand them to a user group who will then take additional time to review and pass comment.And, of course, if people are fully involved in generating solutions, they're more likely to adopt them..