Office occupants as active actors in assessing and informing comfort

Office occupants as active actors in assessing and informing comfort: A context-embedded comfort assessment in indoor environmental quality investigations

Romero Herrera, N.A. (TU Delft Design Conceptualization and Communication)
Doolaard, J.M. (TU Delft Design Conceptualization and Communication)
Guerra Santin, O. (TU Delft Design Conceptualization and Communication)
Jaśkiewicz, T.J. (TU Delft Design Conceptualization and Communication)
Keyson, D.V. (TU Delft Design Conceptualization and Communication)

2018

The energy and building research community acknowledges the importance of including occupants' wellbeing in the evaluation of building energy performance. Particularly in office buildings, occupants' comfort assessment is not yet a common practice, partially due to the shortcomings of the comfort assessment activities. Contextual factors such as the organizational culture, occupants' personality traits and emotional states, and the building and research measurement infrastructures do interact with occupants' motivation to report and influence their actual reporting behaviour. By means of an in situ mixed method approach combining real-world research and user-centric methods, this study investigates the impact of a reporting-based comfort assessment. Two buildings, representing different organizational cultures, were selected to study the influence of reporting behaviour on comfort assessment. The buildings were equipped with innovative indoor climate monitoring and in situ comfort reporting infrastructure and 2-week field studies were conducted in both buildings. By discussing results from these studies, this paper contributes to the development of building research methodologies of indoor climate and comfort assessment by providing practical experience in embedding comfort reporting behaviour in the analysis of comfort assessment. A contextual typology of reporting behaviour is introduced and its implications regarding the reliability and validity of comfort reporting techniques are discussed.

In situ and mixed comfort measurement
building occupants’ reporting behaviour
indoor environmental quality assessment
indoor sensing platform
mixed methods research

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:f13008b9-f8af-4019-98d7-1f93fcd3a884

https://doi.org/10.1080/17512549.2018.1488620

1751-2549

Advances in Building Energy Research, 1-25

Institutional Repository

journal article

© 2018 N.A. Romero Herrera, J.M. Doolaard, O. Guerra Santin, T.J. Jaśkiewicz, D.V. Keyson