CIBSE President Fiona Cousins reframes building performance around four axes - variety, connectedness, readiness and emergence. She argues engineers have agency to bridge capex/opex, shorten feedback loops and deliver healthier, adaptable buildings while advancing credible net-zero standards and career-long learning.
The brief is changing: not just comfort and compliance, but health, resilience and community outcomes. If engineers accept that mandate, the sector can steer faster than policy ever will.
Fiona’s thesis is simple: building performance must be defined by the health, resilience and wellbeing of people and communities, not just kilowatts and capital cost.
“What buildings and building services are really for is the health, resilience, well-being of communities and people… it’s not really about anything else.” - Fiona Cousins
Design for variety: multipurpose spaces that flex across a day and over decades. Think retrofit-ready layouts and controllable comfort.
Treat buildings as network nodes: sometimes supplying, sometimes absorbing across energy, water and data.
Plan for readiness: beyond life-safety to continuity after predictable hazards (flood, heat, outage).
Embrace emergence: as priorities shift (e.g., embodied carbon), move the locus of effort accordingly.
Give engineers agency: tie decisions to outcomes; build breadth (controls, economics, persuasion) on top of depth.
Because occupant health, resilience and social value are first-order outcomes, yet they’re often invisible in briefs. Rewriting the brief around people makes energy, carbon and cost serve a higher purpose.
A connected node exchanges resources and information with its context. Reframing networks (grids, water, digital) changes contracts, risk, and procurement, and it changes building performance expectations from isolated efficiency to shared resilience.
Know your predictable risks and design for continued operation: passive survivability, on-site energy flexibility, flood strategies, and maintainable systems. Bake those into the brief so building performance holds during shocks, not just on design day.
Priorities shift (operational → embodied carbon), so disciplines and metrics evolve. Teams must revisit assumptions, update targets and re-allocate effort to keep building performance aligned with what matters next.
Master one area, then add adjacent skills, controls, electrical, economics, and the “social” skills to win better decisions. That breadth turns intent into outcomes and strengthens building performance at every stage.
Write whole-life outcomes into the brief. Comfort, health, resilience, net zero and hold the capital team accountable for delivering them. Align procurement to lifetime cost so building performance doesn’t degrade at handover.
Major projects are slow, but retrofits and FM generate faster learning. Close the loop: measure in operation, share results, and feed insights back into standards and briefs so building performance improves continuously.
At Darren Evans Ltd, we translate ambitions into measurable briefs, connect design choices to outcomes, and verify in use. This is the kind of work we support at Darren Evans Ltd, bringing clarity to trade-offs so building performance serves people, not just plant.
If this resonates with your challenges, let’s talk. We help teams operationalise resilience, connect to credible standards, and make decisions that stand up over time.
Listen to the full podcast with Fiona Cousins: Unlocking the Full Potential of Engineers: The Art of Asking Better Questions
Read Our Article: How can a white label energy assessment service expand an organisation’s technical service offering?
Related Episode: The Blueprint for Zero-Carbon New Builds: Energy, Heat Pumps, and Smarter Design
If this episode resonated with you or raised questions about how your organisation supports mental wellbeing:
The opportunity is urgent: redefine success now, so the buildings we hand over still work for the world we’ll live in.
