Green Interior Calculator GIC
Ambition:
- We are seeking funding to develop GIC design and decision tool
- GIC’s emphasis is on carbon counting and chemistry counting
- Whenever GIC proposal is mentioned to others there is an immediate positive response
- If funding is gained GIC core will be substantially developed within 6 months
- The greater task will be gathering datasets for many materials and products
- Once complete the same developments in GIC will be applied to GBC & GRC tools as soon as we can.
The big challenges and opportunities:
- UK Planning applications for home improvements increased by 52% in 2021 compared to the previous year,
- suggesting the market for renovations is strong (UK-Planning-Portal, 2021).
- 63% of homeowners plan to make improvements over the next ten years (Halifax, 2022).
- 25% hire interior designers (Houzz&Home, 2023),
- equivalent to an estimated 282,000 projects/year that would benefit from a solution.
- Residential properties account for 17-21% of energy related carbon emissions globally (UN, 2021).
- In the UK, households contribute up to 40% of total emissions (includes energy/transport/waste/etc), with the average home emitting 2.7 tonnes/year CO2 from heating alone (Climate Change Committee, 2021).
- By incorporating eco-friendly choices at design level, people have the potential to reduce energy bills and emissions by up to 30% (Green-Business-Bureau, 2022).
The individual behaviour change opportunity and challenge:
- 66% of home buyers actively seek out properties with eco-friendly features (insulation/renewable energy/etc) (LRG Research, 2021).
- 75% of British adults are worried about climate change (ONS, 2021).
- 81% have made some lifestyle changes to help tackle it (ONS, 2021).
- However, 55% of people say they lack information/guidance on how to help (Kantar-Public, 2021).
Sustainable Furnishings Council’s (SFC)
- 2018 Green Home Furnishings Consumer Study
- 92% of respondents expressed interest in purchasing environmentally safe home furnishings if style and cost considerations were comparable.
- Nearly 60% of respondents are willing to pay 5 to 10 percent more for home furnishings certified to be environmentally safe.
- 92% expressed interest in buying wood furniture certified as legal and coming from responsibly managed forests.
- When it comes to textiles for the home:
- 95% expressed interest in purchasing textiles labelled with a third-party certificate as “safe,”
- 97% want to see certification for “quality materials.”
- 87% want certification that textiles are produced at a verified environmentally friendly, safe and socially responsible facility.
- 69% would work with an environmental safety-conscious interior designer if style and cost were comparable.
- 90% think the chemicals and materials used when manufacturing furniture are important or very important to their purchase decision process.
Supporting UK Creative Industries
- GIC is aimed at Interior Designers and Interior Architects,
- supporting them with the tools and data needed to offer sustainable and healthy interior design options to their clients.
- GIC could also serve other UK creatives including:
- Furniture Designers, Nautical Architects, and Exhibition Designers.
Size of challenge? There are:
- 20,000 practising interior designers in the UK (British-Institute-of-Interior-Design, 2021)
- 46,000 architects (ONS, 2023).
- Furniture designers and makers
- Nautical Architects and boat builders
- Exhibition designers and makers
2 minute introduction:
Introduction / background
- Hi, I’m BrianSpecMan of NGS Ltd.
- creator of design & decision tools for building professionals
- Including Green Apple awarded GBC & GRC
- Green Building & Retrofit Calculators
Problem
- Home renovation is showing a surge in demand for environmental and healthy home interiors.
- It is no longer enough to only consider their carbon-footprint.
- We need to avoid materials off-gassing into airtight energy efficient homes.
- Designers lack the tools to compare material emissions
- and struggle to provide evidence for their specification choices.
Solution
- Green Interior Calculator (GIC) will be a design and decision tool
- including many impact calculators
- GIC scrutinises material and product data to calculate a wide range of outputs.
- GIC will have a designer-focused user-interface.
- Designers will be able to select from
- furniture, fittings and furnishings,
- comparing emissions data between them.
- GIC users will become:
- carbon- and chemistry-literate,
- able to choose intuitively
- without compromising creativity.
- GIC has great education potential
- with career focussed competencies:
- Interrogating studio designs,
- informing better material choices.
- Graduates will want to use GIC in employment
- as witnessed with GBC.
Market
- GIC will be used by interior designers, architects and other creatives.
- GIC will be low-cost entry,
- to encourage wider adoption.
- available as a one-off or by subscription,
- GIC is built around essential product impact datasets
- But allows manufacturers to enhance their information
- with downloadable literature.
Why NGS Ltd.
- Building on 4 years developing GBC & GRC:
- NGS will work with HiiGuru’s network of tech, software & design professionals
- We will want features in GIC to enhance GBC suite of tools later.
Green Interior Furniture Analysis
GIC will collect data on materials and their properties
GIC will create component or sub-assemblies made of those materials
GIC will collate data from the assemblies of materials to make furniture
GIC will then present impact output data related to service life
GIC will quantify materials volumes to multiply impacts againsts
Dimension will also see used to filter materials
GIC Bespoke furniture will calculate volumes for any permutation of assemblies and mixture of materials
Green Interiors Calculator (GIC) In depth:
- Green Interiors Calculator (GIC) is a design and decision tool that enables interior designers to assess and compare environmental and health metrics across different products including furniture, furnishings and materials.
- At NGS, we define sustainable design as HERACEY™:
- healthy, environmental, resourceful, appropriate, competent, effective and yardstick.
- GIC will facilitate the selection of materials to meet the HERACEY™ definition;
- steering material choices away from resource intensive products with negative impacts on the environment and indoor air quality,
- towards local, natural, biobased, low carbon and carbon negative alternatives.
- Designers will be able to produce evidence-based interior designs and specifications that meet customer demands for sustainable, healthier homes.
- For example, avoiding products that can emit toxic fumes into the home (from fire retardants, glues, paints, dye and detergents used in manufacture) or that have a negative impact on the global environment.
Green Interior Calculator (GIC)
- GIC is a design and decision tool that helps interior designers to engage with homeowners’ ambitions to have more environmental, healthier homes.
- GIC seeks house details and client preferences to personalise proposals.
- GIC helps designers to address HERACEY™ issues (ensuring homes are healthy, environmental, resourceful, appropriate, competent, effective and yardstick).
- GIC works at material, product, element and whole fit out levels and allows accurate numerical evaluation of many properties of material choices, and permits comparison of options.
- GIC includes a bill of quantities so that initial and running costs can be considered simultaneously.
- GIC addresses methods, materials and product choices of finishes, furniture and equipment, for complete fit-outs and even improving energy efficiency with internal insulation.
- GIC permits users to choose off the shelf products but also uses models of generic furniture types to specify bespoke furniture choosing each component from a materials library that automatically feeds data to allow numerous calculations to occur instantaneously.
- GIC allows designers to prepare proposals in advance, deliver robust evidence-based data so everybody understands the end result before commencement.
- GIC also permits any substitutions proposed during the works to be evaluated by performance, impact, short and long term costs.
Innovative Solution to an Industry Challenge
- The environmental impact of interiors can be significantly higher than a building due to their short life cycles and requirement for frequent replacement.
- With an urgency to address global carbon we are increasingly seeing manufacturers providing Life Cycle Assessments (LCA) and Environmental Product Declarations (EPD) of materials including Energy, Carbon and other impact data of those materials.
- There are significant amounts of product data available in manufacturers’ literature and Materials Safety Data Sheets (MSDS) but very little is done with this data.
- GIC will extract this information, analysing and processing it to make it comparable across different products and scenarios.
- This goes far beyond carbon counting, comparing data across a vast range of environmental and health metrics.
- GIC will enable designers to compare and evaluate their design and specification choices, providing evidence-based solutions that meet specific client’s preferences for environmental, healthy homes.
New Revenue Stream
- GIC builds on NGS’s already powerful Green Building Calculator (GBC) and Green Retrofit Calculator (GRC) to build a new tool for a new market.
- GIC delivers a significantly more powerful user-friendly design and decision tool with markedly more detailed analysis of embodied impacts of material choices. The new interface provides an opportunity to secure the tools with Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) and more security compared to our existing MS Excel-based calculators.
- Learnings from developing GIC will be applied to improvement of GBC and GRC increasing sales of the whole suite of tools.
Market Readiness
- Building on existing technology and working closely with user representatives means we can develop this solution rapidly, ensuring it meets the needs of the market.
- Following this project we intend to progress quickly, piloting the technology with our user representatives and launching to the wider market within 12 months.
Value
- Building on 4 years of development (GBC and GRC), GIC can be developed at low cost.
- Software and UI/UX development support is provided by HiiGuru.
- As a potential future customer, they have a strong interest in successful project delivery and are providing support at low cost alongside access to user representatives and subject experts.
Supporting Datasets
- In order for GIC to become and remain vital we have planned a number of websites to serve users of and automatically feed GBC, GRC & GIC:
Green Building Product Data Collection
- GBPDC will include:
- Manufacturer, product, system and application dataset
- Product purpose, materials, properties and performances datasets
- Sufficient for an outline specification
- Potentially a full specification
- Some of a Product/Materials Passport
- Environmental Product Declaration dataset
- Material Safety Data Sheet dataset
- To feed the calculations
Green Building Price Book
- Will collect price data, but the challenge will always be:
- how many do you want?
- what discount is the worth?
- GBPB will collect prices for:
- 1 m2, 10 m2, 100 m2, etc. (product or installation)
- 1 m3, 10 m3, 100 m3, etc.
- 1 pallets full, 10 pallets full, etc.
- 1 unopened unsplit pack, 10 , 100, etc.
- Waste removal by skip sizes, waste categories
- Avoiding ‘your best possible price’ which is unobtainable by most
- Avoiding the downwards spiral of specification substitution and increasing performance gap
- GBPB will seek cost data from:
- Suppliers
- Manufacturers
- Installers (approved or trained by manufacturer or supplier)
- Licenced Waste Handlers
- Deconstruction and Demolition is too bespoke to get cost data
- But as a suggestion:
- Give them 1 month to demolish they will charge you
- Give them 3 months to deconstruct they will pay you
Green Glazing Calculator
GGC will support selection and specification of all internal glazing including:
- Partitioning
- Screens
- Mirrors
- Furniture
Green Screed Calculator
GSC will support selection and specification of all internal floor build ups including:
- Structural toppings
- Levelling screeds
- Wearing surfaces
- Beddings
Green Building Robust Specification
GIC will also collect and generate an outline specification for materials or products used
GIC may also collect and generate a full specification
Green Building Facilities Management Specification
Green Building Materials Product Passport
GIC will also collect and generate some of the information needed for a Materials Passport
Green Building Method Statement
© GBE GBC GRC GIC GBL NGS ASWS Brian Murphy aka BrianSpecMan *****
5th March 2024 – 9th March 2024
