Design Software, Green or light brown?

Autodesk has just launched a 'Sustainable Design Centre' which aims to provide a portal for sustainable design and development across all autodesk platforms. There is detailed information about Autodesk itself and its footprint.  The site, whilst informative does not offer a great deal of insight into what and how Autodesk are doing to 'enable' architects and designers to design and evaluate in the context of their tools.

For example, it might be possible to integrate the UK BRE system into Revit or other architectural software to provide a greater level of automation in the evaluation and development.

It feels like a repackaging of information they already have in a greem wrapper. For such a large software development company it falls short of meeting some of the potential that design tools have to assisting the development of more sustainable products and services.

The approach contrasts that of Dassault Systems Solid Works Sustainable Express which acutall leverages a life cycle approach into the tool. This feels like a more structural approach to sustainability than just collecting your tools.

Locus Research and PE Australasia are current investigating a trial project which will critically evaluate the value and limitations of sustainability express and will likely deliver a lecture on this later in June/July this year.  Our newsletter will contain details of this project as it proceeds.