Sustainability
The NOW Sustainability Initiative
Noviun are excited to announce the public launch of our Noviun One World (NOW) sustainability initiative as part of our commitment to Architects Declare, the RIBA 2030 Climate Challenge and LETI.
Our mission is to promote and deliver sustainable practice and design within Noviun, our Projects, our Industry and the Public realm.
Embed sustainable design and practice within Noviun.
Promote sustainable practice and design within and outside the practice.
Research and develop our own sustainable knowledge and skills.
Learn from and share with other practices and bodies.
Create and maintain a sustainable premises, offsetting where possible.
Key Areas
We are achieving these goals by identifying and taking action on key areas across the practice, our focus will be on the following 4 key areas:
Sustainability Toolkit
We have created our Sustainability Toolkit, a practical tool to guide and track key sustainability related decisions and data throughout a project. It is not only useful for individual schemes, each Toolkit is also linked to a Masterfile to allow us to learn from and improve our designs across the practice.
The Toolkit is a prompt and management tool which has been created using the latest guidance and requirements from the RIBA’s Plan of Work Sustainability Strategy Detailed Tasks and Sustainability Outcomes Guide.
We use it within the office to inform our design process and share it with the Client, Design and Contractor Teams as a focus to prompt timely decisions and manage the Golden Thread of sustainable design.
As well as enabling and documenting successful outcomes, our Sustainability Toolkit is also used to identify where we are not achieving sustainability targets, whether this can be rectified and any required mitigation measures.
The Toolkit is designed to be simple and concise and has 3 main sections; a front page with relevant project data and headline features; the Sustainability Outcomes Data section which centrally locates initial design targets through to in use data; and the RIBA Stages. Information is provided from across the Design Team, including Operational and Embodied Carbon, Water Use, Transport, Ecology and Lifecycle Costs.
POE & Social Value Survey
Our Social Value Survey is a Post-Occupaancy Evaluation (POE) survey based on the RIBA’s Social Value Toolkit and measures qualitative end user feedback on our projects.
This looks at Positive Emotions, Connecting, Freedom & Flexibility and, where relevant, user Participation in the design process.
The survey tracks opinions on the current building compared to those prior to the works and also looks at how strongly design has influenced these compared to other factors.
It is a long established fact that a reader will be distracted by the readable content of a page when looking at its layout.
We are also in the process of collating data from past projects to help us evaluate their performance and understand how our designs are working in practice in order to help close the Performance Gap.
Premises
We are committed to becoming a Net Zero office and are in the process of consulting a specialist advisor in order to establish a roadmap in order to achieve this. We monitor our annual energy consumption and analyse these figures and others to produce a Carbon Impact Assessment of our practice in terms of CO2e.
We have recently made significant improvements lowering our waste output, reducing waste going to landfill from our office by 50% over the past year.
A number of us are trialling Compressed Working, which has the benefit of reducing commuting and so our carbon footprint. We also order office supplies within the context of lowering our environmental footprint and acting with a social and ethical consciousness.
Resource & Knowledge Sharing
Plugging into our wider Continual Professional Development scheme, we run a series of informal workshops covering sustainability topics like the RIBA’s Sustainability Outcomes Guide, the Passivhaus RIBA Plan of Work Overlay, and LETI’s Carbon Primer.
The aim of these is to increase our awareness as a practice of key sustainability resources and guidance. We will also be training two further Passivhaus Designers to add to the one we already have in house.
Summary
We see this period as an amazing chance to help increase awareness and take action. Collaboration and communication is key and we look forward to working with clients, contractors and the wider project team so we can all protect, adapt to and thrive in our changing world.
Meet The Team
Mike Terry
Sustainability Lead
Mike joined Noviun in 2022 and brings with him extensive experience as an Architect working on some high profile projects across the country.
Since joining Noviun, Mike has developed our NOW Sustainability Group, ensuring the practice and members are all working with sustainability in mind.
