Development and Validation of a Roadmap to Assist the Performance-Based Early-Stage Design Process of Adaptive Opaque Facades

Adaptive Opaque Facades (AOF) is an innovative concept with potential to achieve low carbon energy buildings. However, so far AOF are not integrated in the construction industry. One remarkable issue that designers have when dealing with alternative low-carbon technologies, such as AOF, is the absence of previous built experiences and the lack of specialised technical knowledge. Design roadmaps can be convenient solutions to guide pioneer low carbon technology applications. This work presents a roadmap to assist the performance-based early-stage design process of Adaptive Opaque Facades. Previous research developed new approaches and tools to assist on the construction definition of AOF, so that their adaptive thermal performance was considered when specific design decisions needed to be made. The roadmap presented in this paper organises the implementation sequence of each methodological approach and tools in different design stages, which aims to provide a holistic design approach for AOF. The usability of the roadmap was validated in a workshop called “Performance-based Design and Assessment of Adaptive Facades” with master students representing the target group of this roadmap. Even though these students had never heard about AOF before, they could successfully design, define the early-stage characteristics of an AOF and quantify the thermal performance of their AOF designs. The roadmap was proven to be a useful support, which might make the implementation of AOF more approachable in the future.