The design-based approach provides a section of Life Cycle Assessments (LCA), focusing on the prediction of Embodied Carbon (EC) in a building. It separates support and infill systems and helps to benchmark EC in early design stages. Through the selection of different construction systems and materials the impact of alternative variants can be analysed in CO2eq kg / kg material, a common indicator for the Global Warming Potential (GWP). The predictive assessment is achieved with a simplified representation of floor plans as a series of shoeboxes, an agglomeration of repeated spatial entities such as wet cell blocks or room clusters. This makes the impact of different design decisions intelligible. The shoe-box approach is inspired by the energy design domain, where it is commonly applied in simulation models in order to reduce the computational demands. In our case shoeboxes represent modules that can be distributed on schematic floor plan layouts to gauge material volumes and derive the GWP in early design phases. The shoe-boxes' enclosures are defined by parametric 2D surfaces that visualise the ratio of support systems to infill components.
