Impact of occupant autonomy on satisfaction and building energy efficiency

The philosophy of building energy management is going through a paradigm change from traditional,often inefficient,user-controlled systems to one that is centrally automated with the aid of IoT-enabled technologies.In this context,occupants’perceived control and building automation may seem to be in conflict.The inquiry of this study is rooted in a proposition that while building automation and centralized control systems are assumed to provide indoor comfort and conserve energy use,limiting occupants’control over their work environment may result in dissatisfaction,and in turn decrease productivity.For assessing this hypothesis,data from the post-occupancy evaluation survey of a smart building in a university in Australia was used to analyze the relationships between perceived control,satisfaction,and perceived productivity.Using structural equation modeling,we have found a positive direct effect of occupants’perceived control on overall satisfaction with their working area.Meanwhile,perceived control exerts an influence on perceived productivity through satisfaction.Furthermore,a field experiment conducted in the same building revealed the potential impact that occupant controllability can have on energy saving.We changed the default light settings from automatic on-and-offto manual-on and automatic-off,letting occupants choose themselves whether to switch the light on or not.Interestingly,about half of the participants usually kept the lights off,preferring daylight in their rooms.This also resulted in a reduction in lighting electricity use by 17.8%without any upfront investment and major technical modification.These findings emphasize the important role of perceived control on occupant satisfaction and productivity,as well as on the energy-saving potential of the user-in-the-loop automation of buildings.

Development of an urban health and wellbeing index for work precincts:A comparative study in Sydney,Australia

Work precincts are recognized for their significant role as generators of employment and associated commerce within urban areas.This study describes a method for analyzing the physical characteristics of urban work precincts in promoting the health and wellbeing of their occupants.The following physical parameters are analyzed:public transport accessibility,green and blue spaces,food environments,fitness facilities,supermarkets,and grocery stores.The parameters are assessed using quantitative spatial analysis based on street network data,as well as point of interest data acquired from OpenStreetMap(OSM).The streets and their intersections are stored in the OSM database as links and nodes,respectively.The evaluation of the performance metrics involves measuring the street network distance from each node to the closest node of interest for each parameter.The metrics are then combined,forming an urban health and wellbeing index(UHWI),which can be used to compare the performance of different precincts.The method was tested by investigating four work precincts in Sydney,Australia,all hosting a large office building belonging to the same business institution.Our results identified two of the four precincts with a high UHWI and resulted in the Identification of one underperforming precinct.