Chris Benedict: Getting More for the Planet within Budget

Chris Benedict is an architect who has been able to deliver extremely energy-efficient projects without adding extra costs to them. To do this, she crunches the numbers she uses to model the building. She showed a slide of a giant spreadsheet and remarked that while we may see columns and rows of numbers, this model lets her see the "life" of the building. What's amazing is that she can build energy-efficient (a recent project uses 85% less energy than standard designs) that cost the same to build as a standard design. You can find photos and more information on Chris' work here.

As someone with a software development background, I can't help but wonder how my industry can get in on this racket? We constantly compare software construction to building construction. Does this comparison go all the way? Is there a different way we could look at the software construction process to allow us to get features that make our users' lives better without breaking the bank?

Posted October 10, 2007 11:26 AM by Brian Jepson | Permalink