International survey of the usage of Whole Building Life Cycle Assessment software

This dataset was collected through a survey of building designers who utilize Whole Building Life Cycle Assessment (WBLCA) software simulations as a decision-making tool. The aim is to identify patterns in the software capabilities usage, thereby providing guidelines to WBLCA software developers.

The survey was structured in three parts: (1) demographic questions, (2) software attributes and (3) informative outputs. Part 1 gathered information about the participants’ geographical location, professional background, duration of performing WBLCA, their motivation, and at which stage of the Building Project Process (BPP) they usually performed the assessment. In part 2, a list of 17 software attributes was presented. The Likert scale was used to rate software attributes in which 1 star represented “not useful at all” and 5 stars represented “extremely useful”. In part 3, participants ranked in order of preference which output format would assist them to make more informed decisions. 

None of the questions were mandatory, i.e., participants were allowed to go to the next part of the survey without completely answering the previous one. The survey was considered for analysis only if all three parts of the survey had at least 50% of the questions answered.