Third Eco-design Chair symposium: a community on the move!

27 November 2014 - Sustainability - France

France: On 13 and 14 November 2014, 300 participants met up for a third symposium to exchange ideas around the research and tools developed in the framework of the Eco-design Chair. This year's theme was the impact of user behaviour on buildings and infrastructure.

The principle behind these symposiums is to disseminate the works carried out in the framework of the Eco-design Chair and share them with the widest possible public. Set up in 2008 by VINCI and ParisTech, the Chair is a platform for scientific patronage. It aims to generate new concepts and tools for eco-urban and biodiversity planning, in partnership with three schools (MINES ParisTech, École des Ponts ParisTech et AgroParisTech). A point worth noting is the growing diversity in this key field of innovation – in 2014, half of ParisTech projects were led by women researchers.

The question of user behaviour is at the heart of eco-design.

Some 300 participants representing the scientific community together with sociologists and urban development stakeholders (companies, architects, engineering and design firms, etc.) gathered at the Cité de la mode et du design on 13 and 14 November. The first day of the symposium took the form of a plenary session on the theme of integrating user behaviour in eco-design. The diversity of perspectives and disciplines provided a good opportunity to compare the Chair's work with the different international approaches.
User behaviour is a crucial component in reflection on infrastructure and buildings. Take energy performance, for instance: the energy consumption of a given housing unit can vary from 1 to 10 depending on user behaviour, as demonstrated by Christophe Beslay (Université Jean Jaurès, Toulouse) with his presentation "The social side of building energy performance".

NB: the presentations are online on the Chair's site.

Aid to decision making thanks to eco-design tools

The second day, organised around workshops, was an opportunity to discover and practise using the tools developed by the ParisTech engineering schools in the framework of the Eco-design Chair. These tools are models developed on scientific bases and are intended to optimize decision making in the field of environmental performance. They can also be offered as a commercial service by engineering and design firms or used as training modules.

Four operational tools were presented and tested by the participants.

- NovaEQUER:
A public software package for life cycle analysis, that makes it possible to simulate environmental performance at the level of an entire district or on an even broader scale, based on several different indicators.

- NewDistrict
A multi-agent tool used to simulate biodiversity changes in a given area as a function of the decisions made by each stakeholder. This tool for learning about the importance of consultation was designed and produced by AgroParisTech, which is currently applying for an open source licence.

- ParkCap
A software package that can be used to optimize the provision of parking and position it as an agent of more fluid urban mobility.

- MAS Platform
This software package developed by Nottingham University is used to model user behaviour (opening of windows, heating recommendations, etc.) in energy simulation for buildings, according to a probabilistic approach.