Climate Resilient Energy Efficient Design in Architecture (CREEDA): a design manual for India

The goal of the CREEDA manual is to immerse Indian architects in the process of designing buildings that are resilient to a changing climate whilst also being highly energy efficient. The approach we take in the manual is one of “learning by doing”. That is, rather than teaching you concepts or calculations, we show how to reason out a strategy for the design of your building at a very early stage in the design process – maybe even before you have drawings. Thus, we wish architects to learn how to PLAY with these types of tools through a process of self-education. Hence the word “CREEDA” which is Sanskrit for “the act of playing”.

The manual contains a series of case study buildings – each based on a real building in India. We show readers how to transform data for such buildings into a free-to-use tool called ZEBRA, use current and future weather data for any part of India at a 25 km spatial resolution and leverage existing knowledge and practices within India to achieve our goal of a truly low-energy climate resilient building. We take each case study building through carefully selected changes to expose the ramifications of designing them differently – in effect showing users how to PLAY with their own designs.