The importance of judgemental factors in environmentally sensitive design

At Brunel University we have been teaching Environmentally Sensitive Design to final year students. Initially we expected that the techniques of Life Cycle analysis (LCA) would provide a reliable tool in this work. However, the more we examined this tool, the more we became convinced that the apparent numerical accuracy of LCA is spurious and misleading. The Designer is left with many judgemental questions and we have developed a number of tools to assist the designer in making these judgements. These include streamlined LCA; an Environmental Design Review and a comprehensive check list. We also report our approach to the aggregation of pollution data in a number of different categories.