This is not complicated, just green and it's time for an installment of common sense. For better construction, we're bridging the information gap to help you reach a brighter future in the built world. Today's episode is sponsored by Creative Interface Architecture and Interiors, making sustainable construction practically impactful.

Check us out at www. creativeinterface.design. Welcome friends. I'm your host James. And I'm very excited to introduce Patrick Chopin, one of the founders of Co Tools. For me, this episode represents just the perfect blend of building science nerdiness with down to earth, straight talk and good common sense.

It's also an example of how smarter design can create not only a longer lasting building with a lower carbon footprint that uses less energy and is more enjoyable to spend your time in, but also smarter tools can make buildings easier to design in less time that costs less to build. So the website to check it out is Cove Tools.

They're helping architects, engineers, contractors, building owners, even publicly traded corporations. They use digital automation and cost optimization of a building. Its systems and the materials used to build it. They focus on data-driven workflows and analytics, which makes it easier than ever to take sustainability concerns into account and making choices about your buildings with easy to use tools that provide quick metrics and graphic representations of the real information that can drive client discussions and design decision making in the brief time since Covid tool began.

The buildings that have been designed using cove tools has offset 33.7 million tons of c O two. Many professionals use Cove tool from early stage energy analysis to compliance level carbon studies all the way through its lifecycle. Please enjoy. Uh, I went to Southern Polytechnique, which is now Kennesaw State for architecture.

Then, um, I went to Purdue for a while for mechanical engineering and done both things, and then got my master's in high performance buildings at Georgia Tech. That's kind of a building simulation focus degree. Makes sense. Mm-hmm. Did you start this company right outta school or what did you do? I, yeah, I'm graduate.

Once I graduated, I knew, I've always wanted to look at the intersection between. Buildings and technology and how it all come together. So I ended up joining, uh, Perkins and Will, which is one of the largest architecture firms in the world. Yeah. And on their research lab, um, was Dr. John Ker. Um mm-hmm. He recently passed.

But I guess on that team, one, one of the things that's really interesting is we were looking at how to integrate, you know, practice driven research into the. Architecture workflow. So it's what got me started working with that. And then once I've worked there for a little bit, Sandy Fuji, who's my co-founder here at K Tool, she and I quit and started a consulting practice.

From that consulting practice. We started automating it until eventually people were like, we'd like to buy that thing that you've made. I was a bunch of scripts that we had hacked together, so I was like, well, can't really buy a bunch of scripts. But my brother, uh, Daniel Chopin, who, who's our c t o for co tool.

I convinced him to quit his high paying job and Okay. And that's how we started Co tool. In the simplest of terms, what is co tool? Yeah. Co tool is a web-based application. It's a kind of a suite that connects together all your different architects, engineers around different things like energy, daylight, carbon.

Glare, all those different pieces. And then we bring in people like prime manufacturers or products. But it's basically we're building what I call the billing information network, trying to create, uh, a complete data model of a building where all the different inputs are known as our ultimate aim. And why is that so important?

Well, the biggest reason is obviously, uh,&