Design eco-drivers

摘要

Interest in ecological design issues has increased enormously over the past few decades and ecological problems are perceived to be on the increase. This paper seeks to investigate the relative importance of the design eco-drivers contributing to ecological building design (EBD) success in the UK. A large number of eco-drivers have been extracted from literature and current design practices. To compare views from architects, data were collected from a statistically significant number of practising architects in the area of sustainable design. The data collected represent the views and ambitions of surveyed architects and not necessarily their current design practices. Ranking techniques are utilised to identify the connotation of eco-design indicators. Based on this analysis, the most important eco-design drivers are extracted. From the results of the overall ranking 'energy, efficiency, energy consumption, energy-eco-efficiency and environmentally adapted technology', eco-drivers are ranked as the most important factors amongst others. This indicates that the surveyed architects strongly perceive ecological design as being driven by energy aspects of building assets. This suggests that these findings are more sensitive to respondents' perception rather than to actual design practices. The selected eco-indicators could be used to assist designers in carrying out ecological design contextual synthesis as well as developing ecological design strategies.