DAYLIGHTING: A SUSTAINABLE DESIGN STRATEGY
As part of my undergraduate at the University of Waterloo capstone project, I joined a team of 5 for 8 months to partner with Smith & Andersen: Footprint to address a sustainable design problem they were facing.
S+A:Footprint had a problem communicating to their clients about a new cutting edge sustainable design proposition they were interested in recommending to them. The new technology they were interested in supporting was: daylighting. Daylighting is a design method that utilizes sunlight to illuminate interior spaces. A straightforward design strategy that required the client to either do quite a bit of forethought or renovations, which could detract the interested party. So the question became, how to make a business case for daylighting?
Once we understood what the benefits could be, we needed to find out why the industry hadn’t embraced the technology and how it could be achieved, to do this we conducted;
1. Subject matter interviews
2. Industry surveys through survey monkey and LinkedIn
3. A case study of Ontario’s best practices.
Taking in all of the different sources of information we were able to create a set of deliverables that could be utilized by S+A: Footprint to show to their clients, and a report and presentation were created for the university.
The project was enthusiastically received by the client, who told us they would be utilizing the materials going forward with clients to onboard them to the sustainable design principle. The University of Waterloo ranked our project in the top 5 innovative projects, so it was with great pleasure that the team presented to The Honourable Elizabeth Dowdeswell, the Lieutenant Governor of Ontario.
