Decision Support Tools for Green Building: Facilitating Selection Among New Adopters on Public Sector Projects

Green building is becoming more mainstream in the public sector, especially in federal agencies such as the U.S. Department of Defense, in a large part due to federal policies requiring more sustainable outcomes in the design and construction of public sector projects. These policies challenge contracted design professionals by adding new demands to a process already constrained by limited budgets, multiple objectives, and short time frames. The purpose of this research is twofold: (a) to inventory decision support tools available to aid the green design process, and (b) to investigate approaches for organizing these tools to facilitate tool selection and adoption by designers new to green building. The research approach is based on principles of innovation adoption theory, specifically the constructs of relative advantage and trialability of innovations. The 275 design-related tools examined here address the spectrum of green building concepts and represent a range of applicability to different design tasks. The findings of this research indicate that while considerable investment has been made in developing freely available web-based tools to support design, a relatively small number of those tools are immediately applicable to the task of making Leadership in Energy and Environment Design (LEED) credit determinations for specific projects. The two characteristics of innovations explored in this research provide a basis for explaining some of the anecdotal observations of tools employed in practice, suggesting a need for further research to confirm and extend the findings.