SmartBioC

Project details

Full project title: Smart Biobased Construction (SmartBioC)

Duration: 2023-ongoing

Industrial partners: 

• The Alliance for Sustainable Building Products (ASBP)
• Woodknowledge Wales
• Amphibia BASE

Project summary

SmartBioC is redefining performance indicators used to assess sustainable building choices and it is implementing smart digital technologies and ‘serious games’ to enable widespread use of climate-neutral biobased materials and building components.

At the heart of the project is the question: How to speed-up the uptake of biobased building solutions to provide zero-carbon, healthy and socially and economically viable solutions for the built environment? In response to this, SmartBioC uses a labelling system, alike the food labelling system, that provides stakeholders including architects, builders, developers and building users with essential information about the building systems they plan to use, design and build with. This multicriteria assessment framework uses five capitals: Human, Financial, Manufactured, Natural and Social as KPIs for aiding informed choices pre-construction; i.e. a 10% Human Capital result would indicate the highest impact on human health and wellbeing through factors such as high water usage and low air quality, whilst an 80% result would be the a positive impact and/or high 'content' of human health and wellbeing attributes.

SmartBioC's multicriteria framework has been applied to three biobased building systems which are compared against a traditional brick and block domestic system used as benchmark. A beta version of a 'serious game' and a mobile application have been developed alongside a physical top trump cards game showcasing the different results using the five capitals.

Additional information

Visit the project website for more information.

SmartBioC