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The retail building market is BIG! The retail building community commands more than 67% of the existing buildings market, according to USGBC.

When USGBC's  Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) for Retail is released in mid-2010--one of the available resources will be Green Retail Guide: Integrating LEED into Your Leasing Process, which is being produced by Portland-based Green Building Services.

Leases for retail spaces with sustainability measures, such as sub-metering, written in make the green building sector field more level with greening leases. It's one of the last bastions of commercial building's "business as usual" mentality that separates the responsibility for energy and water from the people who actually use -- or conserve -- these pricey resources.

The new retail leasing guide by Green Building Services is intended to fill a niche that the wide variety of "green" lease guides and templates on the market don't cover.

In the commercial office and residential sectors, leases tend to be pretty standard and renters operate in just one market. HOWEVER... Retail leases vary greatly from site to site and renters often operate across retail sites. As a result, leasors and leasees need to know about the process of greening their facilities and operations.

Green Leasing Guide for Tenants

Large retailers are leading the way toward "green" leases, so the guide is focused on the tenant perspective. Green Retail Guide: Integrating LEED into Your Leasing Process is written for the tenant...but landlords can certainly read it to know how their tenants want to save energy, use natural light, conserve water...and make their employees and customers happier and healthier with a greener building.

We can design our hearts out, but the final results of a building's functionality is up to the people who use the building for their purposes.  And they never ever match the architect or designer's expectations!  The public is "fickle" -- meaning, of course, complex and unpredictable. But in a recent research project to identify the value and impact of a specific green building and people's experience of it, researchers delved in-depth into the likes and dislikes about the Philip Merrill Environmental Center in Annapolis, MD. 

The most liked features of the building included:

• Connection to nature and the bay
• The lunch room
• Views to the outdoors
• Openness of the space
• Daylight
• Sustainable resoruce use
• Overall aesthetics
• Parking
• Location

And the least liked features of the building included:

• Temperature conditions
• Things not working right
• Moving from downtown
• Insufficient storage
• Insufficient meeting rooms
• Glare from windows
• Central vs. local copiers

Intriguing.   People WANT nature, but then don't like natural conditions.  They like overall space and aesthetics, but dislike taking time to walk a bit to use the space.  We like space but want lots of stuff around us.  Yes, Virginia, we are complex beings! 

Maybe the challenge is one of attitude.  Even an attitude of gratitude! How do we design gratitude into building functionality? 

SOURCE:
The Human Factors of Sustainable Building Design: Post Occupancy Evaluation of the Philip Merrill Environmental Center, Annapolis, MD. by Judith Heerwagen, Ph.D.; Leah Zagreus; and prepared for Drury Crawley, US Department of Energy Building Technology Program

Where's the beef? Well...meeting value, that is.

Architect Scott Simpson described a concept KlingStubbins called a team structure and the industry now calls Integrated Project Delivery (IPD). The concept is key for a collaborative project approach, but its importance is more universal. The phrase that stuck with me was "decision-ready information".

Decision-ready information consists of the key facts required for a meaningful, final decision about a subject to be decided.

In an IPD project, major decision-makers are expected to attend every meeting, so that decisions made in the meeting have meaningful buy-in and closure. These meetings can be intense, not to mention very expensive.

It's the responsibility, therefore, of each team member to bring decision-ready information for the decisions on the agenda.

"Clearly stated, decision-ready information helps your teammates look good to their teammates. Design professionals love representatives who help them look good. (This is also the old-fashioned way information "goes viral": good information gets carried along.)" says Aaron Chusid of Building Product Marketing.

Wouldn't this information design approach make meetings more valuable...and engaging!

Read more at BuildingProductMarketing.com