As described in the COTE Toolkit, Designing for Integration involves creating a central design concept, designing spaces full of beauty and delight, and integrating the ‘integrative design process’. Best Practices include:
Central design concept
- Write a Vision Statement that resonates with the design team, the investors, the operators and managers, the users, the community, and the client. A shared direction that all stakeholders can rally around will set the stage early for positive outcomes.
- Understand and take full advantage of everything the site has to offer. This can include community amenities, local climatic conditions, or a unique history. Wrap these opportunities into a big-picture design concept that can incorporate sustainable design best practices from the other nine measures.
Beauty and delight
- Take inspiration from architectural history. The buildings we revere today provide lessons for the aesthetics or concepts that future generation will want to keep around.
Integrated process
- Incorporate lessons from other disciplines—such as psychology, anthropology, and neuroscience—to appeal to universal biological proclivities and culturally specific values.
- Diagram the relationship between the design concept and how sustainability measures are integrated and complementary to the project’s goals for beautiful design.
You can learn more about this measure here. The entire COTE Toolkit is explained here.