Know your sustainability targets before you draw the first line.
Tell Your Sustainability Friend about your project. Get specific, sustainability-optimizing, measurable design targets, like your window-to-wall ratio and plan depth, before design begins.
Sustainability goals are often set too late, stay too vague, or get lost between concept and construction. Early decisions have the biggest impact, yet that's when specific guidance is hardest to find.
From project brief to clear targets in minutes.
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Share your project
Enter basic details like building type, location, size, and site conditions. It takes a few minutes.
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Get your targets
Receive specific numbers and strategies tailored to your project and climate.
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Design with confidence
Carry clear, prioritized goals into your first sketches and client conversations.
Specific targets for the decisions that matter most.
The earliest design choices lock in most of a building's performance. Your Sustainability Friend gives you a concrete target for each one, specific to your project.
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Position the building to work with the sun, wind, and topography to manage heat gain, ventilation, and daylight.
Example output: Orient the long axis east-west, within 15° of true south.
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Shape the geometry and proportions to limit exposed envelope and weather impact.
Example output: Make the building's plan length 1.5 to 2 times its width. For a 60 ft width, target a 90 to 120 ft length.
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Balance daylight against thermal gain and loss with the right percentage, sizing, and placement of glazing.
Example output: South 38%, north 30%, east 22%, west 18%.
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Keep floor plates narrow enough for natural light and cross-ventilation to do real work.
Example output: Maximum floor plate depth of 45 ft.
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Set the thermal boundary early to cut heating and cooling loads before mechanical equipment is sized.
Example output: Continuous insulation and an airtightness target for your climate zone.
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Coordinate structure, mechanical routing, and solar arrays in schematic design to help identify conflicts before equipment is sized.
Example output: Target 4,000 square feet of usable panel area, which estimates to about 80 kilowatts (kW) at roughly 20 watts per square foot of module. That works out to 40% of a 10,000-square-foot roof, a useful secondary check once access, setbacks, and equipment are placed.
Sustainability, defined as a whole-building view.
Every target Your Sustainability Friend gives you considers the building as a whole, so "sustainable" means coordinated design decisions, not a single score or a checklist.
A friend in the room from day one.
Built for design teams. However your practice handles performance, you get specific targets before the first sketch and a shared starting point for the whole team.
For teams who already do performance modeling
Give your performance modeler initial massing, glazing, and shading targets to test, rather than asking them to establish every starting assumption.
Bridge the gap between designer and engineer by speaking the engineer's data language before day one.
Provide your teams with early reference points to help them evaluate more complex systems, such as geothermal and radiant systems, alongside basic window sizes.
For teams who have never seen a performance model
Small firms and projects with tight budgets get access to performance strategy without a five-figure software license or a staff expert.
Intimidating metrics like solar heat gain, U-values, and daylight autonomy are replaced with actionable directives like keep west glass under 20% and use a 2-foot overhang.
Teams with no sustainability background can begin with clear design targets, providing a starting point for identifying passive-design issues before construction.
For every team
Simple, jargon-free, text-based guidance. Enter basic project parameters and get a printable project charter without a complex modeling interface.
An easy-to-distribute output to give every designer on the team for a shared set of initial targets to discuss and test.
Protect profit margins by avoiding steep learning curves, re-modeling requirements, and time-intensive workflows. This is a good-citizen framework with minimal extra effort.
Good Questions
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Just the basics you already know at kickoff: building type, location, approximate size, budget range, site conditions, project phase, and your goals. No drawings or models required.
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No. Your Sustainability Friend helps you set clear targets at the earliest stage. It doesn't replace detailed analysis, energy modeling, professional judgment, or certification programs. It helps you start those conversations from a stronger place.
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We're starting with common building types and climate zones and expanding from there. Early access members will help shape which project types we support next.