LEED CoreConcepts&Strategies_3rd edition - Page 038

Extracted Content

FOR EXAMPLE:

•• Locating homes near jobs and shops and designing safe, pedestrian-friendly streets can encourage people to walk, both reducing vehicle emissions and improving their health

•• Designing landscapes that use native species can both reduce water consumption and provide habitat for local fauna

•• Orienting buildings appropriately on a site and designing them to catch sunlight for heating and illumination and natural breezes for cooling and ventilation can save energy, improve indoor air quality, and even increase workers’ productivity

•• Composting improves the quality of the soil and reduces greenhouse gas emissions related to trash hauling

Practitioners of an integrative process must develop new skills that might not have been required in their past professional work: critical thinking and questioning, collaboration, teamwork and communication, and a deep understanding of natural processes. An integrative process is a different way of thinking and working, and it creates a team from professionals who have traditionally worked as separate entities.

The integrative process requires more time and collaboration during the early conceptual and design phases than conventional practices. Time must be spent building the team, setting goals, and doing analysis before any decisions are made or implemented. This upfront investment of time, however, reduces the time it takes to produce construction documents. Because the goals have been thoroughly explored and woven throughout the process, projects can be executed more thoughtfully, take advantage of building system synergies, and better meet the needs of their occupants or communities, and ultimately save money, too. The specific steps involved in the integrative process will be addressed in Section 3.

Nature has much to teach us about applying systems thinking, a life-cycle approach, and integrative processes to our work. By observing natural patterns, such as how heat flows, water moves, or trees grow, we can learn to design systems that use resources effectively. The fields of biomimicry and permaculture provide two different and innovative approaches to solving problems by following nature’s patterns and strategies. Both of these fields of practice ask: how would nature solve this? Similarly, green building practitioners can use the core concepts addressed in this section to determine the nature of the systems in which they are working, meet the needs of the community, and set goals and priorities for the project.

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