Product Aware

Isabella worked with a small team from Cox Architecture, BVN and Bates Smart throughout an eighteen month period. Initially, the team conducted research into other databases worldwide in search of a solution for the Australian market. The team concluded that there was no such platform available in Australia that met the brief. There were some platforms that either had commercial funding models or did not include industry best practice sustainability data. Pay-walled sites proved to be a financial barrier for both suppliers and specifiers.

The team completed extensive research and development over approximately 9 months to curate a set of questions that would be applicable to all different types of users. Experts were consulted to peer-review the questions.

The set of questions that suppliers were asked to fill out needed to be achievable and reasonable to expect could be answered, but also aim high towards being a consolidated set of Australian industry best-practice targets for suppliers and specifiers to aspire towards.
Concurrently, the team also liaised with industry bodies to ensure that there would be industry support for Product Aware. This included multiple pro-bono presentations, meetings and gap analysis. Once industry alignment was proven, the team worked towards completing a minimum viable product digital platform.

The Cox development arm was engaged pro-bono to code the digital platform. This went through beta testing with a focus group of designers and suppliers to fix any bugs before launching Product Aware website publicly.

The team exceeded the brief which could have been as simple as a shared spreadsheet document, instead completing a fully functioning web application with advanced search features and log ins. The team provided a solution that not only fixed the problem but also serves as an advocacy and education tool.

Product Aware sets a groundbreaking benchmark for design strategy in Victoria for architects, interior designers, building designers and clients to aim for design excellence in environmental product selection for construction projects. While the majority of the management, coordination and strategy work was undertaken from Victoria and liaising with partners from NSW online, the final site is accessible all across Australia.

The site will benefit professional designers by equipping them with skills and empowering them to make more sustainable building product selections. Thereby enabling them to sell their services to clients and advocate for sustainable outcomes in the built environment. Product Aware was developed to provide a high-quality, fit for purpose user experience through the delivery of a searchable database that is functional and aesthetic.

It was important to provide a quality platform for professional designers to use in their daily workflows, also to make the platform easily accessible to junior designers, students, graduates as well as experienced senior designers. The information on the platform includes tips and a guide on how to understand the product data that is displayed. This enables designers with little or no experience in sustainability to quickly understand some of the key metrics and be able to apply them through using the platform.

The sites functionality includes advances filtering and sorting features to assist designers.
The platform sets a high standard for design excellence extending to Australia and can be used as a precedent worldwide. The impact that the site has can be extended to international construction industries and markets by Product Aware’s prioritisation of environmental performance in supply chains for building products.

Product Aware launched online, with in-person events in Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane in 2024. There are plans to extend more events outside Victoria and to give presentations internationally in the future.

Product Aware is an innovative, digital-disruption platform of the construction industry. Currently, designers tend to select products in a traditional workflow of supplier contacts, targeted sales marketing and aesthetic decision making. This process is problematic especially from the design innovation perspective where designers are bombarded with sales information from suppliers often resulting in sustainability statements with some false claims leading to ‘greenwash’.

Until Product Aware launched in 2024, designers weren’t able to view or compare different products’ environmental performance on a single platform in Australia.
The concept of a freely accessible construction products database was a dream solution to a real problem in industry. The team has been able to deliver a platform to offer designers a real solution that will save time in their daily workflow.

Product Aware was built by designers for designers and responds specifically to the key circumstances of industry where users are time poor and need to be able to access reliable information fast and in an efficient manner.

As far as the team is aware, Product Aware is the only free to access product registry in Australia that is unbiased and does not preference certain products through advertising, features or search engines. Suppliers don’t pay to list their product on the site, their products are listed in order of what each user prioritises when using the site.

Product Aware’s goal is to positively impact the Environment by prioritising environmental goals in the design evaluation process when selecting products. This will benefit clients by assisting to create innovative, sustainable built outcomes that are high-quality spaces for occupants.
When suppliers sign up to Product Aware they fill in a long list of questions about their products that mostly relate to the product’s environmental impact, and the sites unique filtering and sorting system allows designers to search for products that meet the design project’s requirements.

The questions that Product Aware asks about products are in the following categories:

• General Information including raw material source locations, manufacturing location and warehousing location
• Certification schemes such as Cradle to Cradle, Global Greentag, GECA, LFIA Declare and GBCA Responsible Product Value information etc.
• Human Health including VOC levels
• Climate and Ecosystem health including lifecycle assessment information and sustainable installation methods
• Waste Minimisation including design considerations to avoid waste
• Social Responsibility, Equity and Human Rights including modern slavery action plan information

The aim is for designers working on all sectors, project types and scales to use Product Aware, not just a select group of people or high-end designers. The platform is free and accessible for everyone. Other professionals can also use the platform such as builders and engineers. Clients, end users and owner-builders are also able to freely sign up and access Product Aware and this will contribute to circular economy in fit-out and at the end-of-life stage.

Product Aware at its inception, through its development and to its core is a platform that promotes sustainable design, procurement, manufacturing and construction material processes. The platform encourages specifiers to select building products with ethical sourcing, manufacturing and supply chains that have low embodied carbon and can be reused, recycled or break down at end-of-life stage.

Product Aware is not simply a website but an education and advocacy platform that provides educational content and aims to assist specifiers to continuously improve upon industry best-practice standards.

It is critical that front-end designers (specifiers) are considering the circularity of the products they are selecting in their design processes. Unfortunately there are many barriers to this including ‘greenwash’, lack of formal training, misinformation and false claims by suppliers. Product Aware aims to stop greenwash and educate specifiers and suppliers while also providing a searchable database to assist in the ease of sustainable specification in design workflow.

Specifiers sign up for free and can use the advanced sorting and filtering search engine within the platform.

Specifiers can Sort products by:

• Lowest Carbon
• Lowest Water
• Recycled content of product
• Recyclability at end of life
• Manufacturing distance to project site

Specifiers can Filter products by:

• Embodied carbon
• Embodied Water
• Modern Slavery
• Toxicity/VOC

The search engine also allows specifiers to select any certification schemes or building compliance required for the project.

Product Aware is a holistic solution for specifiers to self-educate around sustainability and what environmental performance they should be looking for in their building product selections.

The platform also provides a set of priorities to communicate to suppliers around what high-quality standards of environmental performance they should be working towards if not already.

There is no other platform for the Australian market with these innovative features that is free to access, developed by designers for designers.