Ruken Karakuş

Center for Energy, Environment and Economy (CEEE) was founded as a research and development centre in 2009 at Ozyegin University in Istanbul, Turkey. The centre works on science-based, innovative, and transdisciplinary research, strategy projects on sustainability. CEEE tackles the climate crisis and resource scarcity problems with a holistic system design approach. In order to achieve high performance, resilient and climate resistant built environment, CEEE aims to create and enhance value by multidisciplinary research and work on creating sustainability strategy and planning, conducting building impact assessment, and developing occupant experience design and digital services design. Beside energy efficiency, these research activities aim to leverage demand flexibility both with technical and social factors in order to maximise response potential of demand side management. Main research areas of CEEE are on energy harvesting concepts and the energy efficiency applications for buildings and cities. During last 10 years, OzU/CEEE has completed several funded projects with both national and international companies involving DHL, Bosch-Siemens Turkey, Arçelik, Onur Enerji, Acciona, Deloitte, RISE, RINE Consulting, Dirco, Cartif, Soltigua, Tecnalia, among others. It also completed three EU funded projects related to energy efficiency that NEED4B and BRICKER as FP-7 projects, and TRIBE as HORIZON-2020 Project. In addition, CEEE has already completed a project related to financial risk assessment of building retrofits with Georgia Institute of Technology, USA. This project was co-funded by USA-NSF and Turkish TUBITAK. Beside energy efficiency, CEEE also conducts research in the field of fundamental sciences on nano- and macro-scale radiative transfer and thermal sciences both through EU and TUBITAK-funded projects. To deal with the intrinsically complex nature of sustainability in the real estate industry, CEEE has developed a comprehensive framework to facilitate synergy among distinct realms of the disciplines and propose novel solutions to prestigious research and commercial projects. The framework is based on five pillars in total (see Figure on the right): Building Impact Assessment, Occupant Experience Design and Digital Services Design are comprehensive inter- and trans-disciplinary specialisations that address physical, social, and technological aspects of the building design process. On the other hand, Sustainability Strategy and Value Management are consolidative specialisations to establish the links among them in a unique way for a given real estate development. Sustainability Strategy (SS) aims to identify project requirements, stakeholder relations, risks, opportunities, and methodologies to evaluate and develop a unique strategy document and implementation framework for a given development project (or the development company). Building Impact Assessment (BIA) is to investigate and evaluate environmental, economic, and social impact of proposed sustainability interventions of the project with both qualitative and quantitative methods. Occupant Experience Design (OXD) aims to enhance the daily life of the occupants through the design process and align disciplines accordingly with collaborative efforts for augmenting responsible behaviours regarding sustainability. Digital Services Design (DSD) is for identifying most appropriate digital infrastructure and solution alternatives from technological, economical and governance perspectives. Value Management (VM) aims to enhance the value proposition of the project to cover social, economic, and environmental aspects of sustainability and identify methodologies to realise it. When streamlined for a given project, these 5 services (in research, consultancy or advisory format) of CEEE are poised to advise real estate projects to build and execute their sustainability vision. This comprehensive set of novel specialisations enable actionable and impactful innovations to handle sustainability challenges within social, environmental, and economical realms.