an Aziz

The value of post-occupancy evaluation for building occupants and facility managers

User satisfaction studies and measured performance studies reveal that there are significant gaps between the design intent and the performance of buildings and systems over time and occupancy shifts. Whether this gap is due to failures in the design, construction, management or use of buildings is often unclear, user satisfaction studies, augmented by as-built records and measured performance studies to fully understand the performance of buildings and building systems over time. The article introduces the General Services Administrations (GSA) National Environmental Assessment Toolkit (NEAT) field study tools and database and their contributions to advancing the goals of high-performance buildings that meet ongoing occupancy needs and management resources. The NEAT studies undertaken by Carnegie Mellon Universitys Center for Building Performance GSA have been used to illustrate the value of instrumented post-occupancy evaluation to: promote occupants as sensors and controllers; identify technologies and systems that work; prove that place impacts health and productivity; ensure investment where it matters; recognize the importance of behaviour on environmental gains; and to catalyse innovation.

Beyond Eco-Feedback: Adding Online Manual and Automated Controls to Promote Workplace Sustainability

Whereas eco-feedback has been widely studied in HCI and environmental psychology, online manual control and automated control have been rarely studied with a focus on their long-term quantitative impact and usability. To address this, an intervention was tested with eighty office workers for twenty-seven weeks. Through the long-term field test, it was found that the addition of online controls in the feedback intervention led to more energy savings than feedback only and worked better for light and phone usage than computer and monitor usage. The addition of automated control led to the greatest savings but was less effective for efficient users than inefficient ones.

The Design and Evaluation of Intelligent Energy Dashboard for Sustainability in the Workplace

Office workers typically don’t know how much energy they consume at work. Since the workers don’t pay the energy bills, they tend to waste energy. To support energy conservation and motivate workers, the Intelligent Dashboard for Occupants (ID-O) was developed using multiple intervention strategies – eco-feedback (self-monitoring, advice, and comparison), remote controls, and automated controls. The baseline data was collected for fourteen weeks from eighty office workers and ID-Os with different features were deployed for seven weeks. The results show that the group with all the features (eco-feedback, remote controls, automated controls) made the biggest energy savings at 35.4%, the group that had eco-feedback and the remote controls showed 20.2% energy savings, the feedback only group achieved 9% energy savings, and the last group (the control group) produced 3.6% energy savings. The automated control feature produced the biggest energy savings, and was most effective in energy management for lights and phones, but not for computers and monitors.

Investigating Sustainability Stages in the Workplace

Prior research on stage-based, behavior-change models investigated intervention effectiveness for stress management, smoking cessation, weight management, adherence to lipid-lowering drugs and the like. Few sustainability centered studies identify people’s stage-based levels for energy use reduction or sustainability. In this paper, we investigate sustainability stages with measured behavior and eco-awareness scores based on Geller’s behavior change model. Eighty office employees were assigned to one of four experimental energy dashboard conditions: (a) no energy dashboard; (b) feedback only; (c) feedback and manual on/off controls; and (d) feedback, manual on/off controls, and on/off calendaring. We measured with pre-post surveys change in sustainability levels, energy efficiency discussions frequency, and organizational efforts to understand the work environment. We found that the dashboard with feedback, controls, and on/off calendaring were significantly associated with reported greater energy saving behavior compared to no energy dashboards, and dashboards with fewer features (i.e., feedback only; feedback and on/off control).

The GSA Adaptable Workplace Laboratory

This paper is a progress report on the Adaptable Workplace Laboratory (AWL) within the Headquarters of the General Services Administration (GSA) of the United States of America. GSA owns, operates, leases and rents real estate for major U.S. Government agencies and departments, such as the Environmental Projection Agency, the Department of Energy, and the Department of Commerce. About 1.5 million office workers are housed nationwide in GSA owned, leased or rented buildings. Consequently, GSA is one of the world’s largest landlords.

Critical Frameworks for Building Evaluation: User Satisfaction, Environmental Measurements and the Technical Attributes of Building Systems (POE + M)

An integrated approach to building performance evaluation mandates that post-occupancy evaluation subjective tools be matched by metrics (POE + M). While leveraging occupants as sensors to quickly capture indoor environmental quality or IEQ conditions in a work environment is valuable, the addition of measured environmental conditions across all variables, and of carefully captured records of critical workplace attributes that define their physical environments, are equally critical to understanding building occupant comfort, satisfaction, health, and performance. With over 15 years of POE + M field measurements in office workplaces, the Center for Building Performance and Diagnostics (CBPD) at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) has a database of over 1600 workstations with statistically significant findings about the measured and user-perceived quality of the indoor environment, as well as the technical attributes of building systems that contribute to successful, high performance buildings. This chapter provides an overview of the National Environmental Assessment Toolkit (NEAT) developed with the US General Services Administration (GSA), and an array of findings that will catalyze future indoor environmental standards and improve building enclosure, mechanical, lighting, and interior design.

Towards a Global Concept of Collaborative Space

Both distraction-free and interactive officing strategies will be required for a number of different key work places: the Individual Place, Project Place, Meeting Place, Social Place, and the Electronic Place. Mobility and flexibility in furniture, lighting, thermal, and networking will have significant opportunities for innovation, with the Project Place the most innovative and unknown of these work environments.

The Collaborative Building: Mediating between Climate and Interior Quality

Collaborative environments can be understood to be “enabling” environments, which enable individuals and organizations to be creative and productive. Buildings can be seen to operate as enabling environments at different yet inter-related levels: 1) as mediator between outdoor and indoor environments; 2) as provider of appropriate indoor physical settings; 3) as host to information technology for an organization. This paper focuses on the first level, and describes a range of architectural alternatives for improved indoor environments in commercial buildings. The paper uses illustrative examples of high-performance buildings in the U.S. and Europe, contrasting their respective approaches to the integration of enclosure, mechanical, and lighting systems.