The growing  awareness of sustainability goals and environmental issues pushes even more the  ongoing process of transformation and increasingly complexity of building  sector, bringing out new pressure and more radical changing, involving all the firms’ inner  resources. The change  management process has been disruptive to the extent that while until a short time ago  environmental targets were seen as constraints, today they are even more  considered as a way to improve performance and increase competitiveness. The  result is that nowadays more or less every design firms claim to be  environmentally friendly to take advantage for their business.    In this  context, the research project aims to understand and depict how Architecture, Engineering  and Construction (AEC) firms are equipping and reorganizing themselves in order  to address and meet environmental issues. In particular, the effort is to  identify all the tangible and intangible resources invested by design companies  to achieve environmental goals and their role in decision-making process. In  this direction, the attention is focused on the relationships and the  information’s flow among i) the team of actors and experts involved in the  design process; ii) the set of tools and assets adopted; iii) and the collection  of data required both by experts and tools to work and design. The mapping of  design process is fulfilled conducting, in relation to the phase of the  project, two different models of interviews within AEC firms: the submission of  a questionnaire survey and the examination of case studies. Moreover,  consistently with current trends that lead to consider artefacts as small part  of a larger networks, systems and environment, life cycle approach is taken  during the entire work, to take a broadening of perspective and to avoid  shifting problems from one stage to another.    Analysing  and deepening current practice, the challenge is to develop a framework able to  orient and streamline the design process in line with environmental targets and  life cycle perspective. The goal is achieved combining the theoretical level,  represented by Life Cycle Thinking (LCT) and Life Cycle Assessment (LCA), and  the practical level, represented by AEC firms. Life cycle approach is therefore  matched and implemented in design process, according to the different phases of  the process and identifying the actors engaged and tools used. To face the  complexity of the system and to handle the large amount of data, Building Information Modeling (BIM)  is identified as the most suitable tool to embed the proposed framework. The  application of the framework allows to enforce life cycle perspective in AEC practice starting from the early  stage of the project and to  truly orient decision-making process in line with environmental targets.

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