Sustainable Housing Design: System Control Strategy

Abstract

Current housing design faces various environmental, social, and economic issues, such as climate change, aging population, and workplace needs. Dealing with such issues and pursuing sustainability is a target-oriented challenge. The science of system control can be utilized for all target-oriented tasks. Therefore, applying system control, we have been developing methods for sustainable design. Based on our finished research and practice results, this chapter shows how to design sustainable homes. Section 2 briefly illustrates the methods with two figures: (1) the control system for promoting sustainable housing design, (2) the process of producing and revising sustainable housing design guidelines. Section 3 demonstrates a concrete process of creating sustainable design guidelines. First, it identifies global and general problems related to current homes and specifies requirements for sustainable housing design. Next, it converts these requirements into a tabular form of “housing elements, variables, and their desired values.” The completed table has turned out compact “sustainable housing design guidelines” for general use. The methods have four significant features: (1) total visualization for promoting sustainable design, (2) user-friendliness, (3) comprehensiveness, (4) flexibility toward optimization.