Educating for a Carbon Neutral Future: A Danish perspective in a Global World

In the past decades the focus on first energy efficient architecture and later carbon neutral buildings has increased significantly. A part of this focus has started discussions about the design process and terms like integrated design has emerged from here, focusing on integrating the different fields of knowledge in the design process from the very beginning. However, it has proven to be difficult to do, though a broad range of successful projects using an integrated approach has been seen. A key point in the discussion has been the integration of simulations and calculations as a part of the design process from the very beginning. Using the traditional calculation and simulation tools developed for this has proven to be difficult, thus raising the question of how to approach this, especially in an educational setting, where the talk is on multi-disciplinary design teams, but the students rarely encounter the challenge of working in such teams. However instead of letting the students being limited by the range of different tools and the difficulties there might be in implementing them, the question is how they through an interdisciplinary approach can use the knowledge from both architecture and engineering to break the boundaries between the tools for simulations and calculations and implement them in their design process, by learning to ask the relevant questions and interpret the results they get from the models they produce. The challenge is to design a framework where the students can do this and where the relevant professions teaching interact positively and helps to break the barriers.