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The RCA's Darwin Building, Photogrammetry

A digital twin for transparent energy use in buildings, addressing the climate crisis one building at a time.

At a glance

  • Energy in buildings and cities is one of the largest polluting industries globally, contributing to around 40% of global emissions.
  • Our mission is to address the urgency of the climate crises by creating a hybrid device and platform that integrates a series of existing technologies such as digital twins in a unique way to make carbon and energy data in buildings more visible and actionable at scale.
  • We are focused on key UN Sustainable Development Goals and the UK’s Ten Point Plan for a green industrial revolution.
  • The design strategy is situated within the Five Capitals Model and frames the project within the wider realms of economy, ethics, carbon, governance and technology.

Key details

Gallery

More information

The urgency of the climate crisis and the challenge of carbon data visibility is key to accelerating behavioural change. Our built environment contributes over 40% of carbon emissions and to decarbonise our sector we must make this data visible and actionable at scale. Our USP combines existing technologies to monitor the embodied, operational and long-term predictive carbon metrics at the building scale. This is called DigitID and key metrics include MaterialID, EnergyID and CarbonID. This data will be required by law by 2025 and will provide a systematic framework for future benchmarking of whole building life cycles. Although this may seem complex, our mission is to create an intuitive interface that makes climate action in the built environment simple and transparent. The economic viability depends on the strategic use of expertise outlined in the organisational model, functioning in progressive bursts to make efficient progress.

Educational institutions in the UK and globally have a key responsibility to set precedents for campus decarbonisation by 2030. Our market research exposed the reality that there is currently no integrated system that building owners can use to monitor all of the metrics needed to meet their climate commitments. Digit will launch into the university building sector and work alongside the UN Education Race to Zero, with over 1000 campuses already signed up. There is a clear demand and market viability which links existing siloed data streams, funding streams and social networks that are already in place and can expand into larger identified sectors at the five year milestone.

Lead

Hana Sapherson

Project lead

Buildings, Data & Decarbonisation

Team

Beth Hughes

Advisor

Emre Kayganaci

Advisor (RCA)

Alex J. Woo

Advisor

Yashunori Toshimitsu

Advisor

Victor van der Helm

Advisor

Raphael Channer

Advisor

Peter Town

Advisor

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Email us at

Email us at
254258@network.rca.ac.uk
Digit

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