(From left) Inkling founders Dr Claire Das Bhaumik and Susie Diamond, with recent recruit Marcus Haydon
Inkling was a standout winner at the 2024 CIBSE Building Performance Awards (BPA), where it won the category for Building Performance Consultancy of the Year (up to 50 employees). The company has made a remarkable impact in the building services industry, leading a wave of innovative initiatives designed to future-proof the built environment.
The judges said Inkling was an ‘influential node in industry, which uses collaboration as a means to advocate positive change’.
Its prolific work for, among others, CIBSE, LETI, and the Net Zero Carbon Buildings Standard positions it at the vanguard of industry transformation.
Founded in 2011, Inkling is a building physics consultancy that champions the role and value of dynamic thermal modelling in improving building performance. The founders, Susie Diamond and Dr Claire Das Bhaumik FCIBSE, were joined this year by a third team member, Marcus Haydon MCIBSE.
The firm’s mission is to broaden and deepen its skills and knowledge, and share expertise with peers and the wider industry through various voluntary endeavours. It has been active in CIBSE for more than 20 years. ‘We try to be outward looking and engaged,’ explains Diamond. ‘It’s really valuable to meet people and get a sense of what’s going on. Often people become siloed within organisations’.
Diamond and Das Bhaumik have authored key technical documents and are familiar figures on the conference circuit and regularly host CIBSE events. They present papers at CIBSE’s Technical Symposium, which are often the result of a collaboration with partners outside their field of knowledge (Find out more about a recent project here). Their willingness to look beyond their area of expertise as modellers encapsulates Fiona Cousin’s Presidential call to approach engineering challenges holistically.
The firm’s mission is to broaden and deepen its skills and knowledge
Diamond is on the authorship panel for TM59 Design methodology for the assessment of overheating risk in homes and is collaborating with CIBSE, Arup and Loughborough University on an update to TM59. Her expertise on overheating extends to Approved Document O, which assesses overheating risks in new homes.
Inkling has disseminated information about the new regulation through blogs, talks, discussions with housebuilders, and publications for the Future Homes Hub among others.
Das Bhaumik is helping to drive adoption of the Nabers UK building performance standard. She is on the Nabers UK Independent Design Review Panel and has finished CIBSE’s Advanced simulation training for Nabers UK course.
The designers of Eden, New Bailey – the UK’s first new building to achieve a 5.5-star Nabers UK Design for Performance target rating – said Inkling was ‘invaluable in steering the project through the IDR [independent design review] process’ and provided ‘valuable guidance on the design, modelling and operation of the building, to enable it to operate at peak efficiency’.
Diamond and Das Bhaumik are active on social media, sharing knowledge and offering support to their peers on a wide range of topics. LinkedIn is currently the preferred platform, which Diamond says offers a home to ‘Twitter refugees’ who have been put off by the polarisation of debate on X. ‘That nice community has largely evaporated,’ she says.
Inkling’s blogs and coverage of events offer up-to-the-minute insights, as well as a shop window for the building services sector.
The BPA judges said Inkling’s blog was ‘an influential place for industry discussion’ and called its founders ‘incredibly prolific in spreading understanding and knowledge across the sector’.
Diamond is keen to look at new ways of communicate engineering positively. By way of an example she recently asked comedian Stuart Goldsmith to adapt his climate crisis comedy show for an industry audience.
‘Engineers have the answers but they often find it hard to communicate them in an engaging way,’ says Diamond.
The high profile of its female founders has helped normalise the notion of women working in building services and paved the way for more women to take on prominent roles in the sector.
Inkling was a founder member of CIBSE’s Women in Building Services Engineering group (WiBSE) – Diamond was a founding vice-chair – and Inkling regularly attend WiBSE and National Association of Women in Construction events.
They are keen to promote diversity, inclusion and equality at Inkling, and part of this is having a four-day working week and flexible hours.
The high profile of Inkling’s female founders has helped normalise the notion of women working in building services engineering
‘As two women working in STEM [science, technology, engineering and maths], we are aware of many of the challenges,’ says Diamond. ‘Inkling has been a powerful vehicle in enabling us to do what we are good at and earn a living, while also giving us the flexibility we need to have a life outside of work.
‘I think it’s important to be visible and to show that there is more than one way to be successful,’ she says. ‘We are very clear that having the autonomy to work in a way that suits us individually supports better mental health and productivity. We enable and encourage those we work with to follow suit.’
The company is passionate about mentoring and has supported mentees through the Built By Us Fluid diversity and Shape mentoring programmes (www.builtbyus.org.uk/fluid). ‘These schemes aim to address barriers to diversity and inclusion in the built environment,’ says Diamond, who – together with Das Bhaumik – is keen to give back to the industry that trained her and pass on her skills.
Inkling offers a consultancy service, giving advice to less-experienced modellers within other organisations, and works with LETI to create guidance for modellers).
The firm’s approach was highly praised by the judges, who said it demonstrated that innovation happens through a highly collaborative way of working. This, added the judges, allowed Inkling to ‘punch well above its weight’.