Ventilative Cooling Design In Practice: Where next?

Embedding robust yet accessible frameworks to evaluate ventilative cooling potential during the early/concept design stages for building practitioners can help in reducing the performance gap as well as avoiding vulnerability “lock-in” from design decisions that are based on poor or inadequate information. The challenge is to develop performance based evaluation methods that recognise the tacit approach to design in practice. Often design is iterative, non-linear and multi-agent. For this reason there is a need to harvest knowledge on design practices from industry experts as well as develop support approaches that recognise the potential lack of expert knowledge at the concept stages of design (i.e. limited ventilative cooling design expertise of planning consultants, architects and quantity surveyors). Simple and complex strategies also require different evaluation approaches as well as the need to address the wide varying performance of natural ventilation in reducing the design vs in-use performance gap.