Paul Münzner

According to the World Green Building Council, today’s buildings account for 39% of the world’s energy-related carbon emissions. There is a huge potential for reducing the pressure on the environment and climate by saving energy and resources, and reducing emissions. Companies worldwide have long understood the economic potential. There is a constant flow of new products and technical solutions on the market promising improvements in efficiency and environmental sustainability. But – is it all about technology?

We recently had the chance to find out more about a very different and less technocratic approach by talking to Dr. Astrid Roetzel, Senior Lecturer in Architectural Sustainability at the School of Architecture and Built Environment at Deakin University in Geelong, Australia, and Mark DeKay, Professor of Architecture at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. On ResearchGate, a social network for scientists with 130+ million publications and 15+ million connected researchers, they recently published some findings concerned with the “interplay between people and the design of buildings”, occupant behaviors, people’s individual preferences and, of course, the effects of buildings on energy consumption.

The freely accessible paper titled “An Integral Sustainable Design Approach to Human Inhabitation of Architectural Spaces: Theory and Project Design” was originally presented at the Integral European Conference in Siofok, Hungary, May 2018. It is a team project with co-authors on the paper, Mark DeKay, Astrid Roetzel, Akari Nakai Kidd, Lucy Zinkiewicz, and Anna Klas.

The thought-provoking conversation gave us a taste of how designers often focus too much on building technology and give too little attention to occupants for which buildings are made. Read on for our exclusive interview!

ECOURBANHUB: In brief and simple words: What is your study about?

Astrid Roetzel:

In this project, we are contributing to a better understanding of the interplay between people and the design of buildings, and the related environmental impact. We are learning about what people do and prefer in buildings and why, and what that means for energy performance and building design. It’s a relatively small project on a low budget so we started with a case study at the Deakin University Waterfront Campus in Geelong, Australia. This study is focused on student’s preferences and perception of the architectural space itself as well as indoor (and courtyard) environmental parameters within the spaces.

Mark DeKay:

In the biggest sense, it is about how to understand what people do in buildings and why. In a specific sense, we want to understand how people experience environmental conditions, like temperature, light, and sound. Surprisingly, the architectural discipline does not know very much about people.

ECOURBANHUB: … and what is it good for?

Astrid Roetzel:

We hope to gain new insights for the design of buildings as well as for space conditioning and resulting energy performance. Our initial results suggest three scales of consideration: First we were able to observe some shared preferences that applied to all our participants, such as a place to study that offers a form of spatial refuge and prospect as well as offers low noise levels. Second, we were able to observe patterns that applied to a part of the cohort such as the shared context of early upbringing related to climate zone, lifestyle, built environment context, and related comfort expectations. And third, even within our small cohort of 20 participants, there was remarkable diversity in preferences for reasons related to each individual’s background and past experiences. Examples are past memories evoked by the case study space, ergonomic requirements, interpretation of color or lighting preferences.

We can conclude that ‘one size fits all’ only applies to very few of the investigated parameters, and other than that we have to design for diversity. Knowing this can help us to design better buildings that satisfy more people. The same applies to space conditioning. Today’s comfort standards propose conditions that are assumed to satisfy a majority of people. Our study could shed some light on reasons why some people still have different preferences. More diversity in indoor environmental conditions could help reduce a building’s resulting energy consumption.

Mark DeKay:

We hope it is a new way to use multiple points of view—what we call perspectives— to understand a complex problem that can’t be made sense of with only a single methodology. This is a pilot study, so what it is good for as an ultimate application will be seen sometime in the future. I see this as the first test of this way of looking at the work, our “Integral Research Approach”, applied to understand architecture and design. Whatever one looks at using this multiperspectival approach, the subject is revealed in new ways. Ultimately, that means a better, more full understanding and better decisions based on that understanding.

ECOURBANHUB: You are not the first researchers dealing with occupant behavior. Why is there a further need for research? What was missing? What is the added value?

Astrid Roetzel:

A lot of recent research on occupant behavior emerged out of the building simulation research community, initially driven by the need to quantify human behavior to improve input data for simulation. A lot of studies out of this context were therefore coming from disciplines like building physics, computer science, etc., using quantitative methodologies. Recent research results such as the International Energy Agency IEA Annex 66 project revealed that a lot of contextual and sometimes subjective variables are at play with regards to occupant behavior. With our project we are trying to contribute to the understanding of these insufficiently understood variables, acknowledging that the context of occupant behavior is a complex system consisting of a multitude of dynamically interacting parameters. What we are adding is a more holistic perspective, more awareness on the importance of contextual systems.

Mark DeKay:

Simply stated, most occupant research is rather reductive. It is either based on behavioral observation or quantitative abstractions. People are represented only by their actions or by an algorithm. Sometimes researchers ask people questions, but ultimately, the questions lead to an understanding of people through statistics. These are all valid methods in their own domains, but they all arise from what we call the “Perspective of Behaviors” that is, a mechanistic understanding of how things work. It is the objective and only objective. What that leaves out is how people occupy different patterns of architectural space—the architectural context of their feeling and acting. It also leaves out any first-person understanding of what people actually feel and experience, the subjective view. Finally, most often the cultural context of occupants is left out — for example the effect of cultural norms on dress codes and how that then leads to energy behaviors like overcooling in offices, as just one example.

ECOURBANHUB: In your study, you stated “Poorly understood occupants are a main reason why predicted and actual building energy performance deviate significantly”. Why? Can you give concrete examples?

Astrid Roetzel:

For buildings in early design stages, which don’t exist yet, the only way to evaluate the energy performance is to make predictions using building simulation. Simulation software requires input data about the building itself and its use, such as the use of heating, cooling, lighting, and equipment, use of hot water, etc. In existing buildings, we can measure this usage, but in early design stages this is not possible and assumptions have to be made. In the past these assumptions were often not very accurate, not accounting for the diversity of occupant behavior or contextual influences.

For example, if I am alone in an office I can use the shading system so it suits me, but if I share the office with colleagues the setting that provides me with daylight might cause glare for a colleague, so group dynamics come into play. Also if the switch is far away from my desk or complicated to operate I might be less likely to make frequent adjustments as opposed to a shading control that can be operated locally or from my computer. These contextual parameters influence the shading operation, and with that, the provision of daylight and solar heat gains and the resulting lighting and cooling loads, but they are difficult to predict. This can be a source of inaccuracy in between simulations in early stages and measurements in real buildings.

Mark DeKay:

We started with a big problem, which is that computer simulations of how buildings use energy don’t match up with how much energy buildings actually use when occupied. Energy modelers and the software that they use make a lot of assumptions about occupant behavior, while building scientists have some traditional formulas that try to predict the conditions under which people will be comfortable. It turns out that physics works really well for roofs and windows, but not so good for explaining people and their choices. Therefore, occupants are though by many building scientists to be the biggest unknown in predicting building performance, and no one knows what to do to close the so-called “performance gap.”

ECOURBANHUB: What is meant by and what is the objective of  “An Integral methodological approach” in the context of your study?

Astrid Roetzel:

It means that we are investigating human inhabitation of architectural spaces from four different perspectives, and each perspective uses a different methodology related to a different discipline. For example, we want to know what the indoor / outdoor environmental conditions are in the spaces and we measure that, which is what architectural scientists do. We also want to know how people experience these conditions and therefore we used a method from psychology called the ‘speak-aloud method’ where we recorded people’s live narration of their experience in the moment of measurement.

We also want to know how the participant’s past experiences and cultural context conditioned the experiences in our case study space, and for that we conducted semi-structured interviews, also a methodology that psychologists commonly use. And, last but not least, we are curious about how the architecture of the space contributes to the participant’s experience, and, in order to find that out, we conducted a spatial architectural analysis of the geometry and architectural composition of the space, a method with which architectural designers are familiar. Each methodology generates different results and insights, and in their combination we get a more holistic picture. For example, we not only learn what people prefer but also why they have these preferences.

Mark DeKay:

Earlier, we said that most research about building occupants originates from the Perspective of Behaviors, using scientific and engineering methods, what we call “measure and weigh.” It’s a great approach that can put a human on the moon but can’t explain delight, joy or love—or why we are attracted to views of nature, or a thousand other things about people. The Integral Research Approach (IRA) recognizes that every method reveals some aspect of truth (It is partially true, as Ken Wilber says), and, yet, no method can reveal the whole truth. Therefore, we use the “quadrants” framework to break down a larger research question into four types of questions with one or two questions from each major perspective on knowledge.

Then, we look for a research method with some validity in each of the four knowledge domains. You might say that “four methods are better than one.” The objective is to get a fuller understanding of any phenomenon being studied. The IRA also gives voice and value to various members of an interdisciplinary or transdisciplinary team.

ECOURBANHUB: You also describe your approach “…integrally‐informed, Wilber‐influenced approach…”. What does it mean?

Mark DeKay:

“Integral” in this sense refers to meta-theories that try to integrate, so much as possible, all the realms of human knowledge and experience. Inevitably they seem to involve the fundamental domains like the arts, the sciences, and the humanities. Historically, we have figures like Sri Aurobindo and Jean Gebser. Ken Wilber is perhaps the best known and certainly the most widely published integral thinker working today. He’s worked out over the past few decades an amazing integral theory covering a wide range of subjects.

My book, Integral Sustainable Design, is an application of Wilber’s integral approach to the topic of sustainable design. It uses the basic “AQAL” model, meaning all quadrant-all level. Quadrants refer to a basic diagram with four fundamental perspectives: Experiences (I), Behaviors (It), Systems (complex ‘Its’) and Cultures (We). Levels refer to any number of systems of developmental complexity. The one I used in ISD was to look out through four different contemporary worldviews: Traditional, Modern, Postmodern and Integral. When you combine these, you get sixteen different perspectives on sustainable design, which is a transformation in sustainability consciousness! In our study, we asked a couple of questions about occupants from the four basic perspectives, then tried to generate a research method to answer those questions. As a pilot study, we did not get into levels of complexity, but we did try to work out in a speculative way what “inhabitation” looks like from those sixteen perspectives.

Astrid Roetzel:

It means that we have a theoretical framework to guide us to conduct our collaboration. This framework is based on Wilber’s Integral Theory and Integral Methodological Pluralism (IMP). It suggests that for each of the four perspectives, experiences, behaviors, systems and cultures, two different viewpoints can be taken, from the inside out or from the outside in. For example, as a researcher wanting to investigate experiences, I can immerse myself in a situation and live my own experiences and analyze those, e.g through phenomenological methodologies. This would be looking from inside out. But I can also analyze other people’s reports of their experience, which is what we did using the speak-aloud methodology in our project. We observed the inside perspective from the outside, if that makes sense. If we apply the same to the other perspectives as well, then we end up with 8 methodological approaches.

The biggest picture and most comprehensive understanding is likely to occur when all 8 approaches are employed simultaneously. For the sake of feasibility with a small project and limited team, we used a simplified version of the IMP based on four instead of 8 methodologies in our project, one for each perspective. This approach enables us to be more aware of what we are investigating and what we are not investigating, and where our results have validity and where they don’t.

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ECOURBANHUB: What are the main challenges you were struggling with?

 

Astrid Roetzel:

A challenge resulting from the integral approach is the time needed to collect and analyze the data. Four perspectives mean four methodologies, four different data sets and the time requires to obtain and analyze the data multiplies as well. Also each team member needs to learn something about the other disciplines involved to understand approaches and quality standards. This also takes more time than repeating a standard research methodology you already know, and the more so, the more disciplines are involved. It’s a trade-off between how much time you can spend and how big a picture you’d like to see.

Another challenge was addressing the quality standards in the different disciplines involved with the resources and funding we had available. Normally for the analysis of our demographic questionnaire and the comfort analysis of measured indoor environmental conditions, larger numbers of participants would have strengthened the validity of the results. However, the semi-structured interviews were the most promising methodology to be able to learn from participants what their preferences are based on. Due to the time-consuming nature of conducting these interviews, the costs of transcriptions and the time required for the analysis, lower participant numbers were more manageable. There had to be a trade-off.

Mark DeKay:

One of our challenges, like in any transdisciplinary project, is to talk enough with each other to get language and terminology clarified because different perspectives from different disciplines talk in unique ways about the same topic. They also have different values about what counts for evidence. As we need to publish in what are mostly disciplinary journals, we had to keep looking at what would count in those peer-reviewed venues. There is really no integral journal of architecture, no place that intersects many methods. On top of that, universities like us to publish in top tier journals, which translates to older, established, narrowly topical publications that are headed by and reviewed by older, established, narrowly topical people. We have to take an integrated complex project and slice it into pieces small and narrow enough to fit very non-integral, single perspective dissemination vehicles.

 

ECOURBANHUB: What are your main findings?

 

Astrid Roetzel:

We have several key findings from our study. One is that the IMP based approach does give us a more holistic understanding of human inhabitation of buildings. The indoor and outdoor environmental measurements, as well as the spatial architectural analysis (which is the objective perspective), allowed us to understand what study spaces our participants preferred. These tended to be preferences that were shared because human bodies operate in similar ways for everyone i.e. with regards to comfort our body operates at the same body temperature and our eyes have the same visible spectrum. The voice-recorded in situ experiences of participants and the semi-structured interviews revealed more about why patterns of preferences occurred and also helped to explain the reasons for deviations. For example, the most selected study space was selected for its spatial characteristics of prospect and refuge, and for reasons of thermal and visual comfort, which the cohort who selected this space had in common. Other reasons that contributed to this preference, however, were hugely diverse, ranging from ergonomic quality of the seating to accommodate an injury, symbolic meaning of the wall colors, or the fact that the space evoked memories of the grandparent’s home.

An unexpected finding from our study was the importance of the spatial configuration. All participants pointed out that they wanted a balance of prospect and refuge. Refuge means some cave-like geometry with a lowered ceiling height compared to other spaces and where participants could sit with their back or side to a wall to retreat to for the purpose of studying. While seeking to have their back or side protected, the participants preferred to have prospect, meaning they wanted to have an overview of what was going on in front of them; they wanted to be able to passively observe the scene. We attribute this particular balance between prospect and refuge to the study task we gave them. For example, if we had asked the participants to find a space to exhibit their architectural project, I am sure they would have selected spaces that are more exposed and offer less refuge. For architects, this means that designing for diverse spatial situations is important as that allows for a larger variety of uses by a larger variety of different people. This is especially the case in buildings designed for the real estate market, where inhabitants are not known in early stages or are likely to change throughout the building’s life cycle.

Another finding from our study is that past exposure to climatic conditions seemed to influence preferences of a part of the participant cohort. We found this with those of our participants who had grown up in the vicinity of our case study location in Geelong, Australia. These participants reported an outdoorsy upbringing exposed to the local climatic conditions, and they also grew up in poorly insulated houses in which the fluctuations of outdoor conditions were noticeable indoors as well. These participants preferred a spot in the outdoor courtyard as their preferred study space, and we think this is because of their acclimatization to the outside conditions.

Mark DeKay:

We are still working on that! One thing we found is that we need to expand from the one building we have studied to different kinds of space or different designs that have a wider range of conditions or variability of conditions. We also need to look at spaces where occupants have a more adaptive opportunity, such as the ability and permission to open windows, adjust blinds, or turn off the lights. In the building we studied, none of those actions were available to occupants, so they were left with clothing adjustments and migrating to different locations in the building as a way to address their preferences.

 

 

ECOURBANHUB: What is the value of your developed integral methodology for the practical application or implementation?

 

Astrid Roetzel:

Our project is a small scale pilot study, where we successfully tested the integral approach. We can now apply what we learned from the pilot in other projects. I can imagine an application in practice, i.e. to use this approach and or the outcomes of our study to work with e.g. architects, real estate companies, investors or councils to improve projects or project briefs. I can also imagine more and potentially larger scale research projects using and refining the Integral approach. One key value is that this approach can facilitate communication between quantitative and qualitative perspectives, e.g. between engineers and occupants, or psychologists and facility managers.

Mark DeKay:

Any integral approach, when applied to practical problems, has a few benefits. One is “touching all the bases” (a baseball metaphor), meaning that it is a good scanning mechanism to make sure that one is not leaving out something important to understanding the problem or understanding its context. For example, if you look at the vast majority of studies on occupant and energy use in buildings, most, perhaps 99% of them, have no representations of the architecture—no plans or sections or facade details, no diagrams of human activity patterns, no perspective sketches of the view, often not even a photograph. In short, they leave out a dimensional and spatial description of the very environment they are trying to study. It is not that being limited to asking survey questions and measuring skin temperatures and the like does not yield any result, it is simply that the methods do not give access to an entirely other kind of understanding that only arises when using the tools and methods that architects use to understand and make form and space. Using the IRA, this omission by 99% of the research simply screams out at you!

 

ECOURBANHUB: What is going to happen next with this report?

 

Astrid Roetzel:

We are planning some publications about our results; one is currently under review and others are in preparation. The results will also contribute to the International Energy Agency Annex 79 project on ‘Occupant-Centric Building Design and Operation‘. We hope to raise awareness on the complexity of influences on human inhabitation. And we also would like to explore non-scientific means of communicating the findings.

 

ECOURBANHUB: What are your next steps?

 

Astrid Roetzel:

We will prepare some more papers and look deeper into the architectural design, psychological as well as the architectural science perspectives individually. After that, we’d like to investigate the interplay between the different perspectives further. Seeing human inhabitation of the built environment as a complex and dynamic system, we would like to find out what the key drivers in that system are and what they depend on.

Mark DeKay:

The pluralist approach to design research is slowly spreading, and Deakin is a leader. There are several integrally-informed projects at Deakin now, some of which involve members of our team. Part of what I like to do is just to introduce people to the ideas of the integral model and help them frame problems, research questions and methods and then see where they go. People there are looking at international development, regenerative design and landscape restoration, green construction, homelessness, life-cycle cost, and more. I’ve also last year written a lengthy paper with Greek architectural photographer, Pygmalion Karatzas, that we call the “Integral Lens,” which takes these same notions and applies them to understanding architectural photography. For our Inhabitation project, we would like to expand what we called the “Sixteen Spaces,” in our paper and develop these more. The 16 Spaces of Inhabitation in Buildings is based on the four quadratic perspectives we already talked about, combined with four levels of complexity arising from unfolding stages of worldview. From each of these, the nature of people in buildings looks different.

 

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Bio Astrid Roetzel

Astrid Roetzel is a Senior Lecturer in Architectural Sustainability at the School of Architecture and Built Environment at Deakin University in Geelong, Australia. She currently researches and teaches on environmental implications of human inhabitation of the built environment, approaching it as a complex system consisting of a multitude of dynamically interacting parameters. Her interest is to understand how the built environment context influences or predefines human behavior, lifestyle and resulting energy consumption and to be able to draw conclusions about what design strategies and which communication processes can encourage more environmentally responsible human behavior in the context of a changing climate. She is interested in exploring this topic through theoretical approaches as well as practical applications and collaborations beyond disciplinary or academic boundaries. She is currently a contributor to the International Energy Agency IEA Annex 79 project on Occupant-Centric Building Design and Operation. @ResearchGate

 

Bio Mark DeKay

Mark Dekay is a Professor of Architecture at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, specializing in sustainable design theory and tools. He is author of Integral Sustainable Design: transformative perspectives and primary co-author of Sun, Wind, and Light: architectural design strategies, 3rd edition. He teaches and lectures internationally on climatic design, design education, and integral sustainability. In addition to the integrally-informed “Inhabitation Project,” that applies an integral approach to building occupancy in collaboration with Deakin University researchers, his recent work includes: designing for the urban wind field, integral theory applications to architectural photography, and exploring worldview narratives about nature in architecture. He is currently co-authoring a book on design strategies for rich human experiences of nature and natural forces via buildings. He collaborates with scholars in Scotland, Australia, California, China, and Greece. Mark and his wife and editor, Susanne Bennett, were trained by Al Gore as a Climate Reality Leaders and offer lectures internationally on “Solving the Climate Crisis by Design.” @Academia.edu

 

Faced with the development of a mixed-use complex in the city of Al Khobar on the coast of the hot and dry kingdom of Saudi Arabia, AVCI architects have chosen the only option which made any sense whatsoever. That is to incorporate the two things most seldom seen in the kingdom, namely water and greenery, in their bid to combat the unbearable heat and create a cool microclimate in an area surrounded by desert.

To reach their goal in achieving heat gain reduction naturally, London and Istanbul-based AVCI plan to use greenery in as many open areas in, around, and even on top of the buildings which comprise the 60,000 square meter development set to house a hotel, a mosque, restaurants, and an array of residential, retail and office space.

Extra Attention Paid To Site Placement And Building Massing

To maximize the effectiveness of heat gain reduction, extra attention has also been paid to the site placement and building massing, and the inclusion of shading elements on the facades and in the decorative enclosed balconies and pergolas opening off residential units.

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All outdoor areas on the ground which are to be filled with greenery, have been positioned in such a way as to be sheltered from the sun, and evaporative pools are to be introduced to help reduce the impact of the desert heat through evaporation so as to encourage residents to take advantage of the outdoors in all but the hottest months of the year.

Project Earns Architizer A + Award

 

Although it will be some time before the complex is completed, the approach being taken to its construction, public choice determined the project worthy of an Architizer A+ Award in the Residential Multi-Unit Housing category.