When Autodesk’s Building Performance Analysis Certificate (BPAC) was first generated, it served to fill a gap identified within educational institutes and professional training. This gap, despite its enormous implications on achieving energy efficient building design, was making knowledge of building science accessible and useful to those engaged with the important task of designing our built environment. The original version of the certificate set out to close this gap and was successful by exposing participants to digitally based analysis methods of informing design decisions that improve sustainable performance of a building design. With such a strong and useful agenda within BPAC, one may ask why even create version two?
At Autodesk we are always trying to make our participatory role in sustainable design education more useful and purposeful. Informed by feedback collected from thousands of users, we released an updated version of BPAC in August 2014. With this updated version of BPAC, instead of just focusing on analysis processes and result interpretations, we began to ask how design strategies found in BPAC could relate to the greater comprehensive context of a complete design process. We also wanted to highlight the relationship of Building Performance Analysis to Building Information Modeling; as the two support each other directly. Additionally we wanted to make content relatable to the AEC industry transition to a data/performance driven design process.
While still maintaining our original aspirations to make building science knowledge useful and applicable, we have oriented the certificate to teach building science analysis from the perspective of developing a single design within a workflow that is tailored towards design development and refinement with meaningful and visually attractive data outputs. We did this by mostly rearranging the original content of BPAC into alternate learning modules, and updating that content slightly with more current information. For the most part the original and updated versions of BPAC are the same with some subtle and positive revision. Because we relied so heavily on the updated version of the certificate to relate to the development of a single building design, we were also able to provide more cogent but also more advanced educational material on building performance analysis; primary example being complete building energy analysis with Revit.
Upon completion of the Building Performance Analysis Certificate, participants are not only equipped to conduct performance analysis for sustainable building design, but also learn how to make these processes purposeful by learning how to use cutting edge capabilities of BIM for doing so. To date the BPAC certificate has been pursued by thousands of students and professionals from prominent firms. Just take a look at our BPAC impact page located here. Once one has completed all seven units of the BPAC certificate, they are also awarded a PDF certificate for their records.
Access the courses here and for any further information on the Building Performance Analysis Certificate, please feel free to contact us directly at bpac@autodesk.com
–Dustin Altschul
Building Performance Analysis Intern
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