Tools

Pioneering ways to measure quality and set standards for buildings and public spaces.

Buildings

Design quality indicator

The Design Quality Indicator is a pioneering process for evaluating the design quality of buildings. It has been designed to be used by everyone involved in the construction process from project managers to end users.

Public space

Towards an excellent service for parks and open spaces

Towards An Excellent Service for parks and open spaces (TAES) enables you to benchmark your service against a model of excellence and to plan improvements. Adopting the TAES approach to performance management can assist in improved user satisfaction, staff satisfaction, efficiency, the delivery of parks and open spaces that meet users needs and increased recognition for the parks team within the authority. More information and the TAES framework is available free to download from the IDeA website or from CABE's Towards An Excellent Service for parks and open spaces (TAES) page.

Spaceshaper

Spaceshaper is a practical toolkit for use by anyone - whether a local community group or a professional - to measure the quality of a public space before investing time and money in improving it. The toolkit works by capturing the perceptions of professionals involved in running a space, as well the views of the people that use it. Facilitated workshops allow discussions of the Spaceshaper results, debate issues of design quality and build a better understanding about how the space works for the different stakeholders. The toolkit is positive and aims to raise aspirations, encouraging people to demand more from their local spaces. To find out more contact Nicola Mathers.

Green Flag Award Scheme

The Green Flag Award is the national quality standard for parks and green spaces in England and Wales. It is a means of recognising and rewarding the best green spaces in the country and encourages others to achieve the same high environmental standards, creating a benchmark of excellence in recreational green areas. Both the media and the public are becoming increasingly aware that a site flying a Green Flag is a high quality green space. Awards are given on an annual basis and winners must apply each year to renew their Green Flag status.

Placecheck

Placecheck is a method of assessing the qualities of a place developed by the Urban Design Alliance with the support of English Partnerships and the Department for Communities and Local Government.

Placecheck shows what improvements are needed in an area and focuses people on working together to achieve them. It is a unique and effective way to empower local residents to make a difference to their local environment. Based on a system of questions and answers, Placecheck helps to identify the positive and negative qualities of a place, and can be easily used by both professionals and local residents. It also provides thorough guidance on how to involve local people, politicians and professionals.

GreenSTAT

Developed and supported by GreenSpace, GreenSTAT provides a cost effective approach to collecting data about visitor perceptions and the use of any open space. It supports PPG17 style open space strategies or individual management plans, and allows benchmarking and comparison. Applied through an online database, postal surveys or face-to-face interviews, GreenSTAT provides a powerful analytical tool, and is set to become the first true national standard approach to visitor evaluation for parks.

Community Street Audits

Living Streets Community Street Audits identify issues and opportunities to enhance the public realm and encourage walking. Local knowledge is central to the process, as Living Streets believe that local people understand their area best. Workshops and training encourage community groups or authorities to organise their own audits. Alternatively Living Streets experts can combine the input of local stakeholders with a technical analysis to report a series of recommendations. Often supporting large funding submissions this approach has been successfully applied across the UK, in different contextual areas, including neighbourhood housing estates, city and town centres and university campuses.

Sustainable Communities Programme Handbook

Sustainable Communities Programme Handbook is a practical book, published by ENCAMS, to help everyone work towards making his or her own neighbourhood a better place to live. A word often used to describe this process is sustainability. Sustainability is not only about your community becoming a better place to live, it is also about looking to the future and finding ways of living that will last for future generations.

Prove it!

The Prove it! evaluation approach, developed by a partnership of Groundwork, Barclays plc and the New Economics Foundation (nef) to evaluate a national programme of local community regeneration projects, is designed to be participative, meaningful and action-oriented. The Prove it! handbook describes a method for measuring the effect of community projects on local people, on the relationships between them and on their quality of life. It involves local people in both choosing the indicators and collecting and using the data.

Place Game

Place Game is a series of customised workshops, offered by Project for Public Spaces (PPS), to help communities develop improvement agendas that encourage collaboration and provide a head start toward positive change. Structured around a participatory process in which issues of concern are identified and solutions from other communities are demonstrated and discussed, these workshops provide a forum for the public and private sectors to work together cooperatively on creating useful programs and setting up groundwork for effective implementation.

Environmental impact

BREEAM (BRE Environmental Assessment Method)

For over a decade, BREEAM has been used to assess the environmental performance of both new and existing buildings. It is regarded by the UK's construction and property sectors as the measure of best practice in environmental design and management. BREEAM covers a wide range of environmental issues within one assessment, presenting the results in a way that is widely understood by those involved in property procurement and management.

Health

AEDET Evolution (Achieving Excellence in Design Evaluation Toolkit)

The AEDET Evolution toolkit assists healthcare trusts and the NHS to determine and manage their design requirements from initial proposals to post-project evaluation, concentrating on the product of their project. A design evaluation profile for project teams to use for benchmarking is created by discussing built environment factors through the three layers of scoring, guidance and evidence.

ASPECT (A Staff and Patient Calibration Tool)

ASPECT is used in conjunction with the Staff and Patient Environment heading of the AEDET Evolution toolkit, to establish performance benchmarks for a new healthcare environment. It is based on a database of over 600 pieces of research dealing with the way the healthcare environment can impact on the performance, health outcomes and levels of satisfaction of staff and patients.

IDEAS (Inspiring Design Excellence and Achievement)

IDEAS aids trusts, their architects and design consultants to develop briefs and design ideas. Attention is directed towards qualities that otherwise are often lost in highly technical healthcare environments through examination of real and generic activities such as arriving and entering, receiving, waiting, circulating, consulting/examining, and bed.

Housing

Building for Life standard

The Building for Life standard represents the national standard for housing and neighbourhoods. It is awarded to new housing projects that demonstrate a commitment to high design standards and good place making. The standard is awarded to both private house builders and housing associations.