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Extracted Content

REQUIREMENTS EXPLAINED

This credit requires a different approach to design than the conventional, linear architectural process. Conventionally, the design and construction disciplines work separately, and their solutions to design and construction challenges are fragmented. These “solutions” often create unintended consequences–some positive, but mostly negative. The corollary is that when areas of practice are integrated, it becomes possible to significantly improve building performance and achieve synergies that yield economic, environmental, and human health benefits.

Integrative Design Process (IDP)

In an IDP, an entire team–clients, designers, builders, and operators–identifies overlapping relationships, services, and redundancies among systems so that interdependencies and benefits that might otherwise go unnoticed can be explored, with the goal of increasing performance and reducing costs. To work this way requires that project teams, whose members represent various disciplines, come together so that the knowledge, analyses, and ideas from each discipline can inform and link with the systems and components of all other disciplines. In this way, LEED credits become aspects of a whole rather than separate components, and the entire design and construction team can identify the interrelationships and linked benefits across multiple LEED credits.

Approaching certification using an integrative process gives the project team the greatest chance of success. The process includes three phases:

• Discovery . The most important phase of the integrative process, discovery expands what is conventionally called predesign. A project is unlikely to meet its environmental goals cost-effectively without this discrete phase. Discovery work should take place before schematic design begins.

• Design and construction (implementation) . This phase begins with what is conventionally called schematic design. It resembles conventional practice but integrates all the work and collective understanding of system interactions reached during the discovery phase.

• Occupancy, operations, and performance feedback . This phase focuses on preparing to measure performance and creating feedback mechanisms. Assessing performance against targets is critical for informing building operations and identifying the need for any corrective action.

Achieving economic and environmental performance requires bringing every issue and all essential voices - community, clients, designers, engineers, builders, and operators - into the project at the earliest point, before the team designs anything.

U.S. Green Building Council LEED v5 Reference Guide for Interior Design and Construction, April 2025 Launch Edition 36