Earlier this year CIBSE released the first update to its foremost publication on environmental design, Guide A, in nearly a decade. We spoke to the Chair of the Guide A steering Committee Derrick Braham , to find out the whole story behind the changes to the Guide . What is different about the new guide? First and foremost, the new Guide A is a holistic and comprehensive update of the old. It’s taken nine years of hard work to achieve, but as our flagship guide on environmental design, it’s imperative that care is taken to ensure all the changes of the past decade have been taken into account. And a lot has changed; from new EU regulations to altered Government targets, new research and new techniques, and these all must be taken into account in each chapter to ensure that there is consistency in the design process. There has also been a second driver behind the process of updating Guide A: The building services industry’s response to climate change. This is an aim that

By Geoff Prudence, Chairman of CIBSE Facilities Management Group The task of a Facilities Manager is often a challenging one. Over the last 20 years, the increasing number and complexity of systems in place to operate, control and support systems within buildings has made it necessary for the FM to have a wide range of understanding in more and more areas. The CIBSE Facilities Management Group have long promoted the need for greater understanding and collaboration with the controls industry to improve the operation of buildings. An added complication is the continuum of flaws within a building’s design or materials that make the FM’s job harder, once buildings are in their operational life. Small changes during the design process will have a greater positive or negative impact (and cost) in the operational life, but is an opportunity that must be taken. Some buildings have inefficiencies baked into the design When CIBSE’s President Nick Mead also supported the need for

Mark Hawker of Sainsbury's With August’s announcement of the official programme for CIBSE Building Performance Conference and Exhibition , the countdown to the grand opening begins here. On the 3 rd and 4 th of November, more than 300 of the world’s leading experts in building services engineering will pack the Queen Elizabeth II Exhibition Centre in Westminster along with top manufacturers and leaders in other disciplines related to the built environment. Their focus at this iteration of the Conference will be ‘Working Together for Resilient, Efficient and Healthy Buildings’, and attendees will see talks on security, BIM and performance evaluation amongst others, all tied together by the theme of Nick Mead’s presidency: Collaboration, and how it can improve building performance. In the first of our series of blogs on the upcoming Conference, we spoke to Mark Hawker, Senior Engineering Design Manager at Sainsbury’s Supermarkets Ltd about the session he will be lead