iiSBE Team Canada launches its SB Challenge project

The Canadian iiSBE team consists of about 20 experienced professional engineers, architects and researchers from across Canada. The team has submitted projects to all of the global SB conferences since 1998 and has six projects lined up for the WSB 2014 Barcelona conference.
Previous SB Challenges have relied on national or individual teams to present projects with predicted performance data generated during the design phase. This year, the SB Challenge process is focusing on a comparison of predicted performance with actual performance, as recorded after at least two years of occupancy. We anticipate that this approach will be more relevant to the industry and the research community.

The Canadian team has a roster of previously-assessed projects and has been able to identify find 6 projects for which operating data is available or can be produced with some additional work. The Canadian team’s approach to the post-occupancy evaluations (POE) is to complement operating data and context information with occupant surveys.

A full-blown POE is therefore an expensive affair, and the Canadian team sought funding from both public and private sources. The last week of January brought news that the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC) will provide $48,000 CAD, which will be complemented by $24,000 CAD from Stantec, a major Canadian engineering firm, and another $24,000 worth of “sweat equity” from the voluntary efforts of iiSBE’s team members. Finally, Ryerson University (Toronto) will provide $10,000 to support students who participate in fieldwork Manitoba Hydro may also provide an additional $10,000 of support to the project.

The six projects that the Canadian team currently proposes to assess include the following, all of which have had design-stage assessments carried out for previous SB Challenge rounds. The initial selection of six may change if problems are encountered with availability of operating data.

 Manitoba Hydro headquarters
 Red River College
 CIRS Building, Vancouver, B.C.
 Canal Building, Carleton University, Ottawa
 Okanagan College, B.C.
 Alice Turner Library, Saskatoon, Saskatchewan

Mark Gorgolewski, Professor at Ryerson Unibversity, will be the Principal Investigator and coordinator for this project. The division of effort by universities to undertake the onsite data collection and analysis will be split equally with Ryerson, UBC and University of Manitoba. These universities have all identified students for this project.

With the assistance of the Technical Committee, Dr. Gorgolewski will proceed with the finalization of the POE protocol and will report back to the Team for feedback. The Team members assigned to a project, deemed iiSBE Champions, will handle coordination between the building representative and the University project team assigned to that building.

Some 15 SB Challenge submissions have been received, but eligible projects will be welcomed for the next two weeks. SB Challenge projects will be shown at the World SB Conference in Barcelona in October this year. Contact