ENGAGING CLIENTS IN DAYLIGHTING DESIGN
When making major design decisions, having your client’s full support is an important and valuable aspect of a project. Whether formalizing a building programme or selecting featured materials, collaboration always leads to the best result for all stakeholders. The same is true for daylighting design.
KEY LEARNINGS
- Confidence to talk about and demonstrate the value of good daylighting design with your client.
- Ensure your consultants are on board with a holistic approach to daylighting, indoor comfort and energy performance.
Some clients might have a working knowledge of how important natural light is for human psychology and wellbeing. They may also understand some of the wider benefits for buildings. More likely, however, is that you will have knowledge and expertise to share with them as you begin a project and start to set daylighting goals together. It is then a good idea to leverage those daylighting goals as a key reference point for ongoing discussion around how certain choices taken on design solutions will transform their project and foster a holistic understanding of why certain design solutions are more suited to their brief.
Priorities, budget and added value
Very often, ambitious project aspirations give way to budgetary realities later on in the development process. ‘Cost engineering’ typically begins with design elements that stakeholders deem least necessary, or which provide the least perceived value to a project.
This is why it is crucial to take your client on a learning journey, building their engagement with daylighting concepts, and ensuring the value perceived from delivering good daylighting becomes inseparable from what makes their project successful. That perception can be shaped through a strategic design concept, concrete ‘success’ criteria, for the project that relates to good daylighting, and other elements that you can include in the project brief – these topics will be covered in more depth in the next article.
In addition to including daylighting goals within the project brief it is important to gain engagement conversationally. Sharing with clients examples of projects where daylighting is a key component to an increased value per square meter is also a useful way to build understanding of its impact beyond aesthetics. This can include residential case studies that illustrate houses with good daylight sell at a higher price; office spaces where good daylighting commands higher rental values and where employees are more productive; multi-functional/use spaces where extra revenue streams are created through quality, experiential daylighting and so on.
If elements of a daylighting strategy do ever come into opposition with budget constraints, it is important to foster a holistic view from the client. The multi-faceted experiential value that natural light provides to users and occupants of buildings includes the following (all of which have financial benefits):
- Improved health and wellbeing of occupants
- Improved mood, especially when coupled with high quality outdoor views
- Enhanced employee performance
- Reduced energy consumption
- Increased space flexibility
In support of this, there is a growing body of international research that demonstrates the immense value of daylighting in buildings which you may also choose to share with some clients.
Bringing consultants on board through a new sustainability lens
Clients are in general aware of the phenomenon of daylight, considering the sensation of daylight (or the lack of it) and its ability to increase their well-being. It is something they have experienced and can relate to, even if it is often seen as a subjective preference (nice-to-have) compared to something like a building's energy consumption. However, in certain cases where high daylight levels can correspond with an increase in the amount of energy used to heat up or cool down a building's indoor temperature a new challenge is presented in the prioritisation of daylight, and it requires alignment with other project stakeholders.
Over the past four decades, engineers have been heavily focused on optimizing the energy consumption of buildings due to the increasing regulatory pressure to buildings' energy performance and as a result have often seen daylight purely in terms of energy1. This has made it challenging on certain projects, to prioritise daylight in an optimal way if the engineer involved is not also engaged with the daylighting ambitions and aware of the importance of striking the right balance.
With sustainability becoming an integrated part of designing buildings and the regulation surrounding the process, the motivation for designing spaces where, the lifecycle of materials, impact on nature and human comfort is more thoroughly considered, has increased. This new way of thinking has led to a more holistic approach towards choosing building materials, designing for human needs, and measuring the impact on our environment and brings a new opportunity for engaging engineers in the daylighting discussion at a more holistic level.
There are many national systems for rating buildings against sustainability criteria but the best-known international systems include BREEAM, LEED, HQE and DGNB, all of which have a daylight parameter to be assessed and measured.
Life Cycle Assessments (LCA's) are also being introduced across countries as a methodology assessing material's environmental impact through evaluating a building's carbon footprint. The total embodied carbon is measured per built square meter, further requiring designers and engineers to think more efficiently in terms of sustainable materials, multifunctionality and innovative comfort solutions, overall encouraging the design of smaller, less resource intense buildings.
The balance of these different sustainability parameters is good news for daylighting which is typically a core feature of flexible, healthy, valuable, and enduring community spaces that require minimal energy use through occupied hours.
DID YOU KNOW? A roof window provides up to three times more daylight than an equivalent-sized façade window. When striving for efficient whole-life performance as well as good daylighting, consider zenithal light as the most efficient use of glass for daylighting purposes.
Putting daylighting ambitions in context
Hopefully, both clients and consultants will be responsive to the important benefits of daylighting and committed to realising daylighting ambitions. Sometimes, however, discussing benefits only in general terms is not enough to make a convincing case. Specificity becomes more important and more compelling to ensure everyone is working towards the same result. Stating the case for daylighting in terms of defined goals that can be included in a formal project brief can therefore make the benefits of daylighting more tangible and more achievable.
1 Strømann-Andersen, Jakob. (2022) Discussion with Henning Larson Architects on working with daylight. 23rd March.