The ‘Building Better Buildings: 50 years of Environmental Design and Engineering at The Bartlett’ event on the 15^th February was a huge success. The IEDE Director, Prof Mike Davies, opened the event by presenting the two key themes of the Institute’s current research portfolio: building physics and systems thinking. This was followed by talks by Simon Hart, Team Leader of the Built Environment at Innovate UK, who presented the Building Performance Evaluation Programme, and Rob Pannell, Managing Director of the Zero Carbon Hub, who emphasised the need to stimulate industry investment to close the building performance gap. According to the speakers, we still do not fully understand the problem. People in the industry do care but there is a lack of proper training of the workforce. Research funding causes ‘secret knowledge’ and we need to find a way to release it into the public domain. On the other hand, building performance evidence creates a huge amount of value for the industry and the digital economy is growing faster than any other part of the economy. In line with these trends, the Digital Catapult’s Building Data Exchange platform and Zero Carbon Hub’s illustrated guides to building energy efficient homes are clearly steps in the right direction. (more…)