Human Behavior & Low Energy Architecture: Linking Environmental Adaptation, Personal Comfort, & Energy Use in the Built Environment

Truly sustainable buildings serve to enrich the daily sensory experience of their human inhabitants while consuming the least amount of energy possible, yet building occupants remain a poorly characterized variable in even the most “green” of building design and operation approaches. This deficiency hinders efforts to reduce whole building energy consumption, as discrepancies between actual and predicted energy use are increasingly attributed to inaccurate representation of occupants and their adaptive behaviors. It also counters the goal of improving Indoor Environmental Quality (IEQ) as faulty projections of how real occupants will perceive a building environment lead to frequent problems with discomfort and associated issues with productivity, health, and general well-being. Going forward, better tools are needed during the building design and operation processes for considering human occupants, their environmental perceptions, and the related behavioral interactions they may have with a building context.