By Mark Maddalina, AIA, and Kristin Purdy, AIA
We’ve been hearing from many firms about how they use the Framework for Design Excellence (formerly the COTE Top Ten Toolkit) in their practices -- in project work, client conversations, training, awards submittals, and storytelling. We asked Mark Maddalina, AIA, and Kristin Purdy, AIA, to share their story about SWBR, a firm of 101 people with offices in Rochester and Syracuse, New York.
We feel that the COTE Top Ten Measures are an absolutely great framework for our firm’s best practices.
Last year, our firm was discussing how to update and expand our existing (and LEED-influenced) Sustainable Design Best Practices in a way that would establish a more effective design baseline for us firm-wide. That was about the same time we became an AIA 2030 signatory, and since then we have been incredibly busy. Mark met Corey Squire and learned about what was then called the COTE Top Ten Toolkit. This Toolkit was of great interest to us as we were growing and interested in knowledge management. We became convinced that our 100-person firm had to consider a new system of sharing sustainable design information than our previously 70-person firm had utilized, particularly if we are to be aligned as we look ahead to 2030.
We developed a framework for sharing information aligned with the COTE Top Ten Measures, which we find relevant to projects of all types. We conducted focus groups with each studio and department, and ultimately developed a firm-specific complement to the Toolkit with links to our firm’s assets and project experiences.
For example, to complement the Design for Ecology Measure, we provide links to select internal assets including our own key details, relevant product information, client presentation content and cost data in support of the design of green roofs and bird-safe glazing. From a knowledge management aspect, this enables information to be readily available to designers, architects and project managers and provides our teams the assets they need to have informed design discussions as early as possible.
Our Best Practices evolve and grow, but we’ve got a great start. The process of developing this also revealed gaps in our resources that we’ve since addressed. For instance, we’ve updated our design narrative template (intended for our kickoff meetings) to include questions that mirror the Top Ten Measures and also support the sustainability conversation required by the AIA Code of Ethics.
We have conducted an education session for the firm, with more sessions on the way to ensure 100% attendance. We strongly support working in the mindset of the COTE Top Ten Measures as early and often as possible. To expedite the roll-out of our Best Practices, we have provided a smart PDF document located on our intranet. We published our Best Practices in Summer 2019 and our Sustainability Action Plan was recently uploaded to the DDx. We are now turning our focus to 2030 reporting.
We profiled the efforts of Lassel Architects, Opsis, and NBBJ here and in the January COTE news, we learned about Hastings Architecture’s efforts.
How is your firm using the Toolkit and the Framework for Design Excellence? We’d love to learn what’s working — and what’s not — and share your story so that other firms can learn. Let us know at kiragould@kiragould.com.