Name
Designing with Data: LEED v5’s Human Impact Assessment for Neighborhood Quality of Life
Date & Time
Friday, October 16, 2026, 10:00 AM - 11:30 AM
Adele Houghton Nyasha Felder Larissa McFall
Description

This hands-on workshop explores how LEED v5 elevates quality of life, equity, and community wellbeing through new prerequisites, with a focus on the Human Impact Assessment. These tools help project teams use LEED certification as a pathway to create measurable social and environmental benefits for building occupants, construction teams, and surrounding communities. Participants will learn to use a GIS-based web platform to compile and analyze socioeconomic, environmental justice, public health, and climate risk data through a human-centered framework. Through guided walkthrough and applied exercise, attendees interpret outputs to identify vulnerabilities, community priorities, and lived experience at site and neighborhood scales. The workshop emphasizes translating assessment findings into actionable design strategies that advance health, safety, resilience, and equity. Participants will work through case studies and structured templates to prioritize findings, connecting insights to design decisions, and aligning outcomes with LEED credits and integrative, community-engaged design processes. As expectations around transparency and accountability increase, architects are called to address climate hazards and social inequities shaping project performance. Amid reductions in federal open data access, the LEED data repository extends datasets and demonstrates the value of neighborhood-scale data for land use planning, reinforcing this assessment as a core responsibility of equitable, community-centered design.

Course Credit
LU/HSW
Number of Credits
1.5 Learning Units (90 min)
ID
4259