The Integrative Design Collaborative is a consortium of advanced practitioners who serve as resources, coaches, and program managers to help project teams achieve increasingly higher levels of environmentally responsible design – from Green to Sustainability to Regeneration

We assist clients and design teams to achieve cost effective green to whole system design in complex projects. These range from master plans and buildings to regions, watersheds, and communities.

We promote understanding of the benefits of human activity in healthy participation with natural systems by structuring the design process to achieve affordable and deeply effective ecological systems design.

It's all about applying systems thinking to address the whole system – not just the pieces. It's just good design.

Background

Just as our relationship to nature is complex, so too are the issues that are addressed in our buildings and their relationship to the overall environment. The Integrative Design Collaborative (IDC) considers buildings, and the larger environment, as inter-linked systems. A successful building and master planning project is a solution of complex issues that are optimized to be greater than the sum of their parts. The best green buildings and community designs strive for the optimum integration of natural, social, and engineered systems and technologies. The result is a more beneficial relationship with our environment in terms of cost, long-term impact, health and quality of life.

About IDC

IDC is a company experienced in the most advanced concepts of ecologically effective design. It is composed of a team of experts who have been leading the development in this field for the last twenty five years. This team has worked together to help define many of the issues that are now being addressed in environmentally responsible building and system design. For example, we have been involved with the development of the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design Rating System - LEED® - since its very beginning and serve on the LEED® Advanced Faculty. We are now working at the level of “regeneration of place” – involving the core relationships of earth systems, human systems and the spirit of connection that holds these communities together.

IDC functions as a coach and a resource for design and building owner teams to understand and cost effectively incorporate environmentally effective approaches in building and master plan design. Because a broad range of natural and man-made systems become interactive when we build, a resource group of appropriate expertise is brought together in IDC to support any level of project complexity. IDC has expertise in:

• facilitating the integrative design process,
• appropriate energy systems,
• community development patterns (transportation, social patterns, community aspirations),
• green construction materials and methods,
• water quality and conservation, land regeneration and permaculture systems analysis

IDC’s purpose is to support and educate our clientele and to inspire solutions that integrate the best natural, community, and engineered systems processes available.