We live in the Age of Metrics where every bit of information and experience can now be quantified and digitized: steps we take each day, calories burned, hours slept, the number of people who just unfollowed you on Twitter, and infinitely more.  Now building performance can be measured in real-time as well with the LEED Dynamic Plaque.

A LEED Dynamic Plaque proudly hangs on the lobby of an office building. (Courtesy of Dpr-review.com)

Introduced last year, the LEED Dynamic Plaque is both an online dashboard and a physical plaque that monitor, measure, and display a building’s performance in real-time.  It’s a sweet distillation of all the groundbreaking efforts USGBC has been doing for the past fifteen years.

The Dynamic Plaque, according to USGBC’s Rick Fedrizzi, is the star of the show.  Essentially a sleek disc or a square, the plaque is a simplified graphic representation and a scoreboard of a building’s performance across five important categories: Energy, Water, Waste, Transportation and Human Experience, (the last one measured by a simple electronic survey).

The plaque is meant to be hung on the wall of the office lobby, in clear view of building occupants and visitors alike, to remind everyone about the status of their own building.  As USGBC puts it, every building is alive.  And the Dynamic Plaque is a darn good way to show how every aspect of a building: from the water that trickles down the drain, to the thermal comfort experienced by employees, to the right kind of lighting used for every room, can vastly affect the building as a whole.  Data is shown in real time.

Of course behind this setup is the web-based software, the online dashboard for inputting various details about the building (LEED Online Project ID, address, year built, operating hours, occupancy, gross floor area), as well as historic performance data based on 12 months of energy and water use.

Woman examines a LEED Dynamic Plaque (Courtesy of www.ideo.com)

Being real-time and evidence-based, the LEED Dynamic Plaque doesn’t just give us a holistic view of a building’s performance, it also helps in policy making as it illuminates trends that could prove beneficial to the building.

It also does a good job of keeping building owners honest, because of course they can’t argue with and ignore data that’s right on their face.  Even USGBC’s own Platinum-certified headquarters, when measured by the Dynamic Plaque, was only equivalent to Gold, which prompted them to make some important changes.

Numbers really do tell a story.  The great thing about metrics is that it lets us make wise decisions about the things that really matter, especially when it comes to policies that involve thousands of dollars’ worth of investment.

And let’s face it, few or almost no one reads a building plaque.  No one’s particularly interested in the building’s history, or the mission and vision statement, and other tiring verbiage.  But the at-a-glance info presented by the LEED Dynamic Plaque is something that everyone can always look forward to.

For more info about the LEED Dynamic Plaque, visit LeedOn.io