With the growing demand for sustainable accountability, the European Directive 2014/24/EU (EU 2014) pushes architects to deliver Building Information Models (BIM) as a part of procurement processes for public buildings. In the Netherlands, BIM model data is relevant to the building permitting process, which involves an environmental performance calculation (MPG). This assessment takes into consideration the embodied carbon of materials in a building. Although this analysis is performed by a qualified expert in late design phases, architects benefit from integrating carbon data in early design decision-making. Design methods supported by Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) values are needed before involving expert collaborators, and not only when applying for a building permit. The existing carbon assessment tools require detailed data from BIM models, which are often not available at early design phases. Simplified tools have been discussed in theory, and explored in their potential applications, however, there lacks scientific literature discussing the hurdles designers face in their attempt to create such tools in practice, for their internal use throughout early design phases. This paper focuses on the architecture professional practice and design methods supported by digital and computational technologies, regarding embodied carbon data. It investigates the challenges in integrating embodied carbon data in the design workflow, through the development of a digital tool made by designers, for designers. This paper conducts an empirical investigation within a Rotterdam-based architecture office, with a broad portfolio in BIM usage and public building projects, to identify and categorize the factors affecting carbon data integration into the design workflow. It proposes a taxonomy of challenges within the architecture office, to better communicate the designer’s needs to the data providers and software developers with architects as a target user. Amongst the bottlenecks encountered are: access to data inclusiveness), data literacy and connecting data usage with design decision-making.

With the growing demand for sustainable accountability, the European Directive 2014/24/EU (EU 2014) pushes architects to deliver Building Information Models (BIM) as a part of procurement processes for public buildings. In the Netherlands, BIM model data is relevant to the building permitting process, which involves an environmental performance calculation (MPG). This assessment takes into consideration the embodied carbon of materials in a building. Although this analysis is performed by a qualified expert in late design phases, architects benefit from integrating carbon data in early design decision-making. Design methods supported by Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) values are needed before involving expert collaborators, and not only when applying for a building permit. The existing carbon assessment tools require detailed data from BIM models, which are often not available at early design phases. Simplified tools have been discussed in theory, and explored in their potential applications, however, there lacks scientific literature discussing the hurdles designers face in their attempt to create such tools in practice, for their internal use throughout early design phases. This paper focuses on the architecture professional practice and design methods supported by digital and computational technologies, regarding embodied carbon data. It investigates the challenges in integrating embodied carbon data in the design workflow, through the development of a digital tool made by designers, for designers. This paper conducts an empirical investigation within a Rotterdam-based architecture office, with a broad portfolio in BIM usage and public building projects, to identify and categorize the factors affecting carbon data integration into the design workflows. It proposes a taxonomy of challenges within the architecture office, to better communicate the designer's needs to the data providers and software developers with architects as a target user. Amongst the bottlenecks encountered are: access to data (data inclusiveness), data literacy and connecting data usage with design decision-making.

The development of Building Information Modelling (BIM) has enabled new opportunities, such as standard data storage and collaborative building design. Moreover, there exist many Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) tools and Building Energy Performance (BEP) simulators that use the Industry Foundation Classes (IFC) exports of BIM platforms as input for further operational analysis. While the extracted IFC files contain numerical and tabular data from the BIM model, the visual data including floor plans and section drawings is often obtained directly from the original 3D software such as REVIT. In this study, we introduce an open-source solution, BatchPlan, for batch processing IFC files of medium- and high-rise building projects, leading to floor plan extraction on a large scale. Furthermore, we have designed a user-friendly graphical interface that allows users to select floors manually. BatchPlan is based on open-source Python packages; thus users can easily edit and adapt it to their specific requirements. The presented solution enables a scalable data generation pipeline for downstream tasks that require extensive quantitative analysis, such as machine learning models to perform material detection, volume estimation, and environmental impact prediction.

The Karbon Tool aims to streamline design decision regarding material choices, raising awareness about CO2 impact in early design phases.

A dashboard shows values of carbon impact per material choice, visualized as an architectural diagram colored in green when impact is lower than a established threshold, and red when higher.