The environmental brief: pathways for advancing green design

The move to ecological sustainable development requires new principles, technology, tools and changes to the process of planning and design. This paper argues that there are emerging pathways that can be developed to meet the goal of ecological sustainable development. The pathways are informing the social, cultural and political milieu in which designers’ work and present new opportunities for improvement. The paper argues for the need to explore the opportunities found in the scope of design in particular pre-design through utilization of the briefing for environmental purposes, sketch design through the integration of new tools for performance evaluation and for post occupancy study of the environmental existing buildings to create blue prints for future development. The approach, which links these three opportunities.is called ‘environmental briefing’ since it creates a new direction with regard to the changing social, cultural and political landscape for designers. Conference theme: Social, cultural and political. Key words; Green design, briefing