Integrative design strategies

The integrative design process focuses on collaboration across disciplinary boundaries to identify strategies that enhance one another and/or together reduce costs — also known as synergies. Taking this approach can improve performance by considering impacts beyond the conventional scope and boundary of the project, developing solutions that address multiple issues, and reducing costs by minimizing changes and unintended consequences.

Explore this section to find technical assistance and resources for collaborative design processes and systems thinking, including strategies for project teams and tools for conducting a life-cycle assessment.

• Discover the key elements of systems thinking and how to holistically evaluate systems and their interrelationships to support high performance buildings.
• Explore the process and key roles critical to building an integrative project team and how to facilitate a collaborative approach that advances high performance goals.
• Learn about how to consider and account for the environmental impacts and financial costs of materials and resources over their entire life span. Understand and compare life cycle assessment, or LCA, and life cycle costing, or LCC. Access tools and resources to assist in conducting an LCA.