Quantifying occupant comfort and behavior : case study of Lebanese academic buildings.

Abstract

Sustainability-focused design of buildings has been the center of attention of researchers and designers in recent years. However, occupants’ comfort has not been typically taken into consideration when designing sustainable buildings. As such, energy savings goals have not been generally achieved in these designs due to occupants’ behavioral changes in response to satisfaction with the Indoor Environmental Quality. Therefore, Post-Occupancy Evaluation is necessary to understand occupants’ comfort and needs to improve the building design and accomplish the sustainability goals. This study conducts a survey in three academic buildings at the American University of Beirut, Lebanon: an old building (Architecture building), a renovated building (Bechtel building) and a new LEED certified building (IOEC building). The focus of this research is to understand which components of the Indoor Environmental Quality mostly affect the occupants’ satisfaction, by targeting students, faculty members and staff. The collected data is first used to quantify the level of satisfaction with each component of the IEQ through a descriptive statistical analysis. Results show that occupants are mostly dissatisfied with the Thermal and Aesthetics, followed by the Indoor Air Quality and Acoustic components. The occupants are satisfied with the Visual level of comfort. Behavior analysis reveals that occupants who are dissatisfied with their thermal comfort and the indoor air quality tend to behave in ways to increase their level of satisfaction which causes dissipation of energy. Therefore, energy savings designs need to be preceded by or informed by studies about occupants’ comfort in other similar buildings, to ensure the sustainability goals are met. A structural equation model is developed based on the collected data from students in classrooms. The results show that the Indoor Air Quality, the Acoustic level of comfort and the Thermal level of comfort predict the Overall Level of Satisfaction in a decr