Paz Arroyo

During the building design process hundreds of decisions are made at different stages, and with multiple stakeholders. This includes choosing alternative materials, components, assemblies, systems, and buildings shapes. The design team faces many challenges in order to evaluate which alternative is more sustainable. The methods used in making those decisions must take the complexity of the design process into account and help the design team in understanding the trade-offs that must be made. This must be done based on context, and in a transparent and collaborative fashion. What is more, the design team may benefit from keeping decisions objective for as long as possible during the decision process to avoid unnecessary conflict and suboptimal decisions. Ultimately, the decision-making method used in those decisions will impact the final building design, and therefore, the building’s social-, environmental-, and economic outcomes. Much like designers and engineers benefit from relying on specific modeling-, analysis-, and evaluation methods to inform their judgment in the course of the design, the design team would also benefit from relying on decision-making methods. However, the architecture-, engineering-, and construction-management literature provides almost n