A lean management tool for housing design

The construction sector is facing complex challenges due to the actual and future strong increase of energy performance requirements and the slower but net change of other users’ needs and habits. Some forward-looking construction companies, in Italy, are already trying to improve their standard solutions to improve their market placement and anticipate the legislative steps towards 2020 (the new EPBD will require new private buildings to be nearly zero energy, after that date). Nevertheless, Italian practitioners and companies do not have a validated tool to be used to assess the overall quality of a building (including usability, flexibility and other indoor environment issues) except environmental certification schemes that are usually too complex or too rigid to be used. This paper presents a lean tool for the quality assessment of a residential building, designed to be used by a small-tomedium-sized construction company, where the application of existing, comprehensive tools would be too complex or too expensive: it reduces building quality issues to three items (envelope energy efficiency, layout serviceability and indoor air quality) and aims to let companies regain an integrated role in the management of the design process, measuring the environmental quality of the proposed solutions, and to effectively communicate it and its innovative content to their potential customers. Such a “design management tool” was tested on a set of actual buildings to assess the feasibility of its application in a context that represents a large part of the Italian housing market.