Your Resilient Home

How can Australian homeowners safeguard their homes against our changing climate and the increased occurrence of extreme weather events such as bushfires and floods? How can they ensure that their homes will be comfortable during heatwaves or cold snaps? And that they will be efficient and economical to run?

Your Resilient Home is a new user-friendly guide produced by ISF for Canberra's Suburban Land Agency. It is a resource for homeowners in the Australian Capital Territory (ACT) to help them when planning a new home or renovation.

The guide explains the specific impacts of climate change that could affect ACT residents – from extreme temperatures to pollen storms – and provides practical advice on ways to ensure homes are designed to meet them. Your Resilient Home includes guidance in all aspects of building and renovation from preparing a block and laying foundations to wall materials and glazing. It also features information about dealing with emergencies and options for cost-effective water and energy systems.

Visual communication

One outstanding aspect of Your Resilient Home is its arresting graphics. Understanding that the guide should be appealing to – and easily understood by – a diverse readership, ISF researchers Caitlin McGee, Kerryn Wilmot and Rupert Legg worked with visual designer Chris Gaul of Parallel Lines to translate their words into visuals. 

Kerryn Wilmot explains the collaborative process: "The Suburban Land Agency emphasised the need for the guide to be highly visual so that it would be easy for the widest range of people to read. Our visual designer developed the visual language and guided us to convert concepts into diagrams wherever possible. It was fun to work so creatively and bring clarity to concepts that the authors are familiar with, but are not so obvious to others.

The result is an effective communication of sometimes confusing, technical information, such as in this diagram summarising all of the features a resilient house might include.

Expert advice

The guide draws on ISF's decades-long experience compiling and updating Your Home, Australia's most comprehensive guide to environmentally sustainable homes. Your Home is used by the Master Builders' Association as a training resource and the Your Home website receives more than 1 million visits per year.

For Your Resilient Home, the ISF research team also brought in expert adviser Adam Hobill of Canberra-based agency Adam Hobill Design to peer review the content and provide insights from an ACT perspective.