Welcome to the Design Intent Tool. The Tool helps building owners, architects, and engineers
develop a Design Intent Document (DID) to facilitate record-keeping and ensure that the owner's
and designer's up-front vision and goals (with a focus on energy-efficiency, but applicable to
any aspect of design) are achieved and periodically verified through performance measurement.
The tool is available at no charge via http://ateam.lbl.gov/DesignIntent/home.html.
As the fields of facility design and management mature, there is an increasing understanding
that it is necessary but not sufficient to simply specify “good” technologies or design features
in order to achieve desired performance. Efforts to do so are often thwarted by the absence of
explicit direction from the owner, misunderstandings and different visions among members
of the design team, and ambiguities imposed by the lack of measurable performance targets.
The lack of clarity created by these problems in turn hampers the post-construction commissioning
and measurement & verification processes. A more comprehensive and holistic approach can be
described as “Design Intent Documentation”. At the heart of the Design Intent Tool is a framework
in which design solutions can be described in terms of Objectives (overall goals), with subordinate Strategies
(specific means of achieving the goals), and Metrics (measurable performance targets).
The result is an improved likelihood of attaining desired energy savings targets.
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