Status of the Standard

What the standard is, who maintains it, and what a reference to it means.

Voluntary

The Apareé Digital Architecture Guidelines are a voluntary standard. The standard creates no legal rights or obligations of its own. It acquires force through the instruments that reference it — a lease, a management agreement, a brand agreement, a procurement specification — and the force it acquires is defined by those instruments, not by the standard.

A building's conformance claim is a statement about demonstrated behavior at examination, as defined under Conformance. It is not a warranty of future behavior.

Normative and informative

Within each expectation page:

• Expectation and Required are normative — they define what conformance requires.
• Recommended is normative in form but optional in effect — it does not affect conformance.
• In practice and Failure modes are informative — they illustrate; they impose nothing.
• Test defines the means of demonstrating conformance.

The glossary defines terms; definitions carry no obligations. Cross-domain references are informative annotations. The introductory pages — the Introduction, the domain and quality overviews, the building-type applications, the audience guides, and the design, implementation, and specification guides — are informative. Model language in Specifying the Standard is illustrative; it becomes binding only as adopted by an instrument's parties.

Authorship and maintenance

Apareé authors and maintains the standard. The text is published openly: free to read, cite, and reference, and free to examine a building against.

Apareé also designs, commissions, and operates behavioral infrastructure for buildings — against the standard. The standard's integrity does not depend on engaging the bureau: the text is public, revisions are documented with their reasoning, and any building can examine itself, claim conformance, and reference the standard without Apareé's involvement or knowledge. The standard defines expectations; engagement with the bureau is a separate decision.

Revisions follow the discipline described in the Methodology: the structure is stable, expectations evolve through documented revision, and nothing changes because a single building or project found a requirement inconvenient.

Standard and measurement

The standard defines expectations. Around it sits a measurement apparatus in three named layers, each maintained separately from the text of the standard:

• LEI (Living Experience Index) — the scoring methodology: the mathematics that converts examined behavior into scores. Maintained separately by Apareé.
• Behavioral profile — the scored result for one building: its behavior read against the standard, expressed through LEI.
• The Benchmark — the public surface where scored buildings are published and behavioral profiles can be read side by side.

The separation is by design. The standard does not change based on scoring methodology, and the methodology can evolve without rewriting the standard. The standard's own vocabulary ends at met and not met; scores begin where LEI begins.

Edition and revision record

Current edition: first edition, 2026.

Conformance claims reference the edition. When a new edition is published, claims against the previous edition remain valid as claims against that edition.