To be able to change something, you need to be able to measure it first.

That applies to everything including sustainable design. But once you can measure it, you need to start making changes and not just focus on improving your measurements.

Balancing all the elements of sustainable design can be difficult; there are 7 RIBA Sustainable Outcomes, 9 BREEAM categories, 20 Living Building Challenge Imperatives or 17 UN Sustainable Development Goals. Making sure your design addresses them all is difficult for professionals and students.

To make the process easier to start, I’ve created this table of Sustainable Measures and Design Strategies. I introduced it at the recent ACAN Education Workshop. You can select three or four design strategies that in combination have an impact on as many of the measures as possible. In the example here I’ve chosen circular economy, urban farming and passivhaus which could have an impact on most the measures.

If you have any feedback or suggestions for changes it would be great to hear them.

You can download a high resolution version of the file below: