The growing awareness of sustainability goals and environmental issues pushes even more the ongoing process of transformation and increasingly complexity of building sector, bringing out new pressure and more radical changing, involving all the firms’ inner resources. The change management process has been disruptive to the extent that while until a short time ago environmental targets were seen as constraints, today they are even more considered as a way to improve performance and increase competitiveness. The result is that nowadays more or less every design firms claim to be environmentally friendly to take advantage for their business. In this context, the research project aims to understand and depict how Architecture, Engineering and Construction (AEC) firms are equipping and reorganizing themselves in order to address and meet environmental issues. In particular, the effort is to identify all the tangible and intangible resources invested by design companies to achieve environmental goals and their role in decision-making process. In this direction, the attention is focused on the relationships and the information’s flow among i) the team of actors and experts involved in the design process; ii) the set of tools and assets adopted; iii) and the collection of data required both by experts and tools to work and design. The mapping of design process is fulfilled conducting, in relation to the phase of the project, two different models of interviews within AEC firms: the submission of a questionnaire survey and the examination of case studies. Moreover, consistently with current trends that lead to consider artefacts as small part of a larger networks, systems and environment, life cycle approach is taken during the entire work, to take a broadening of perspective and to avoid shifting problems from one stage to another. Analysing and deepening current practice, the challenge is to develop a framework able to orient and streamline the design process in line with environmental targets and life cycle perspective. The goal is achieved combining the theoretical level, represented by Life Cycle Thinking (LCT) and Life Cycle Assessment (LCA), and the practical level, represented by AEC firms. Life cycle approach is therefore matched and implemented in design process, according to the different phases of the process and identifying the actors engaged and tools used. To face the complexity of the system and to handle the large amount of data, Building Information Modeling (BIM) is identified as the most suitable tool to embed the proposed framework. The application of the framework allows to enforce life cycle perspective in AEC practice starting from the early stage of the project and to truly orient decision-making process in line with environmental targets.
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