Development work-Week 9
This week our task was to develop a set of principles that we were all happy with that our future designs would all include. I must admit I really didn't think that this task would be as easy as it was. Using the research that we had compiled really helped make this process a lot easier as they were guidelines as to what fundamental to our design and what wasn't.. The two fundamental ideas for our future designs were passive cooling and bringing the outdoors in. During this design phase we were really conscious of the fact that we had to include the 'off the grid' aspect. So to address this we talked about things such as grouping the services together and discussed what type of systems we should use that would best work not only for the environment but for the overall scheme.

The bringing the outdoors in and the passive cooling aspect really go hand in hand. the most important part of the design is that we need to feel comfortable in it, the ways in which to achieve this we felt were zoning of the areas known as 'pods' which all our individual designs incorporated. Other ways to cool the house which we wanted to include into the final design were cross ventilation achieved via louvers and large windows and doors opposite one another. Other ways in which we discussed to open up the house to the surrounding environment included movable screens, a lot of bi-fold doors and bathroom that opens to the environment which is not only for aesthetics but for ventilation purposes also.