Statement of Research
High performance buildings, sustainable design and construction haveever-increasing value in terms of protecting the ecosystems, global economy, and public awareness. To maintain this value, the United States’ federal and state agenciesand professional organizationssupport the development and use of rating systems and standards to promote sustainability. Achieving a sustainable built environment for public and private facilities is challenging, as it involves complex interactionbetween the built, natural, economic, and social systems at variousstages of a building’s life. Moreover, sustainable technologies and rating systems keep evolving,therebyintroducing newer concepts called Innovations towards Sustainability (ITS) and system-based measurements. As a researcher, it is my prime interestto test the feasibility and effectiveness of such new concepts. Additionally, it is also crucial to track the behavior and changes of ITS or rating systems over time to promote a sustainable environment. To gauge the success or failure of the application of any eco-innovation,it is essential to study its majorvariables such as the type of attributes exhibited by ITS and factors including: product-process, adoption-rejection patterns, marketability, total cost, and its diffusion within an organization.
Shift towards systems thinking:
Additionally, my research also aims atdetermining the impacts of natural systems and biomimicry into sustainable design of the built environment.Natural systems are fundamentally designed to be cyclic in nature, whereas most manmade systems are linear. While both must co-exist with each other, overtime our dependency on natural systems has been ignored. The quintessential paradigm of interactions between manmade and natural systems are such that a system must reflect the finite ability of the natural systems to cope with the waste and energy demands before survival is significantly altered. This fact highlights the importance of a manmade system exhibiting design and behavior of the natural systems in terms of complementing each other.Researching new models that emulatenature and are designed on the principles of regenerative design:to study the potential of promoting radical changes to human operations, including construction, systems, and sub-systems within a facility,tobe more compatiblewith nature are areas of interest to my future endeavors.
Adoption of ITS:
My research goal further focuses on creating awarenessto place emphasis on protecting the natural systems that surroundsus,and understanding the cumulative impacts of human activity on the natural system within whichhumans exist. The lack of “systems thinking” has inhibited the introduction of efficiency improvements that come from the redesigning and reengineering of large systems.Furthermore, the deficiency of high-quality, easy-to-use information systems that identify opportunities for more efficiency improvements is one of the contributing barriersto adoption. Conducting studies in these areas provides a roadmap to promote diffusion, and understand barriers and accelerators for the adoption of ITS. In addition, it guides users, stakeholders, and building manufacturers for their initial encounters with ITS.
Building Information Modeling (BIM):
Until recently,BIM implementation by certain professionals in the Architecture/Engineering/Construction (AEC) mainly focused on enhancing the visualization of the project. However,one of the major unrealizedbenefits of BIM lies in its application across the entire project, especially in the areas of improved building performance, and to assist the AEC industry to achieve net-zero facilities. Furthermore, perceived adoption of ITS is dependent to a certain extent on consensus among the stakeholders, and BIM at times helps accelerate the process. This is possible due to its attributes such as data integration, data processing, higher levels of visualization, and others that allows users to testand trystrategies under various scenarios and conduct comparative analysis with existing technologies in a virtual environment to realize benefits. In short, BIM has the capacity to hold values about a project to determine whether a specific action will have significant effects on expressed values and then link the model with those values. In addition, steps towards reduction of interoperability issues and emergence of 3D printing, constructability/execution of complex design is no longer constrained. These developments havethe ability to create a paradigm shift within the AEC industry where professionals in an integrated environment have the ability to design, test, and build facilities that are inspired from the concept of Biomimicry,thereby paving way for facilities that are not only intelligent but also responsive and resilient to the externalities.In this context,my research interest focuses onintegration and testing of technologies, developing process maps and decision-making tools to apply these concepts and observe applicability of systemic structure for building design. My ultimate research goal aims atusing BIM to create naturalsystems that can be incorporated within facilities, and analyze its success for real world applications.