SHB2009 - 1st International Conference on Sustainable Healthy Buildings; Seoul, Korea.

6 February 2009

Sustainable Design and Well-Being

 

Koen Steemers

The Martin Centre for Architectural and Urban Studies

Department of Architecture, University of Cambridge, UK

Introduction

The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate the relationships between sustainable building design and
occupant well-being. It starts with a definition of sustainable design and well-being, and focuses on
energy and lighting as two representative parameters. These are studied in detail drawing on research
based at or coming out of the Martin Centre for Architectural Studies. The purpose is not focus on
work of the UK’s leading architectural research group at Cambridge but to demonstrate how the
agenda of research has shifted to address human-centred issues.

Background

There has been a shift in the direction of scientific research related to the energy and environmental
performance of buildings which has focussed on human-centred concerns (Steemers, 2003). One
reason is that there is now a greater awareness that these concerns are in fact a key parameter in the
performance of buildings.

The response to recent health-related issues, such as SARS, has added a significant impetus to
research in the field of indoor environmental quality (IEQ), on which other speakers at this conference
are best placed to report in detail. For example, it is apparent that the focus of ventilation studies has
shifted from energy efficiency and comfort to ensuring health standards, and that this shift has
highlighted conflicts between the two (i.e. over-ventilation to ensure fresh air but increasing energy
demand for heating or cooling) (Li, 2008).

At a more subtle level, research in the field of lighting design has moved from the exploration of
simple parameters such as illuminance levels and daylight sufficiency to more occupant-centred
related from seasonally affective disorder (SAD), and more recently to perception, and well-being
(Veitch et al, 2008).

The role of occupant perception and behaviour in the environmental performance of buildings has
been a direction of research at the Martin Centre, the research wing at the University of Cambridge,
Department of Architecture. This centre was rated the top research department in architecture and the
built environment in the UK in a recent national research assessment exercise (e.g. The Guardian,
2008). It serves as a useful example for the purpose of this paper and I will draw upon relevant
research to make the key points in this paper.

Sustainability

In the various definitions of sustainable design the common aspects are: environment, society and
economy – sometimes referred to as “the triple bottom line”. An alternative and helpful description of
this triple bottom line is: Planet (i.e. environment), People (i.e. society) and Prosperity (i.e. economy)
(BOOM-Duijvestein, 2009). This makes it clear that the role of people is critical to the definition of
sustainable design. Duijvestein ingenuously incorporates “Project” as a fourth, design-centred
dimension and presents the relationships between the four in the form of a sustainability pyramid.
Whichever aspect one might like to put at the apex and thereby prioritise, the relationships remain,

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like a three-legged stool, as fundamental supports for the focus of research. In the context of this
paper, we will prioritise “People” over “Project”, “Planet” and “Prosperity”.

project  people 

prosperity prosperity

planet  project

people planet 

Fig. 1 - The sustainability pyramid (after BOOM-Duijvestein, 2009)

Well-being

The well-being of people is commonly defined in terms of their “Health”, “Comfort” and “Happiness”.
These three aspects correspond quite well with the fundamental requirements of architecture defined
over 2000 years ago by Vitruvius: “Firmness, Commodity and Delight”. In our recent research work
we have discussed the interrelationships between these aspects and environmental diversity in
architecture (Steemers and Steane, 2004). Although I won’t discuss directly issues related to physical
“health” in any detail, I will discuss the topics of “comfort” and “happiness” in relation to
environmental performance of buildings. It is important to note that these parameters are quite
evidently interrelated, to the extent that for example unhappiness and discomfort can lead to poor
health (psychological or physical).

Here "health" is defined as more than the absence of disease, however one could define health,
comfort and happiness as lying on a well-being spectrum from the directly measurable (e.g. symptoms,
body temperature, blood chemistry, etc) to the unmeasurable (e.g. quality, delight, etc). Louis Kahn,
the American architect, expresses the following opinion related to this issue: “I only wish that the first
really worthwhile discovery of science would be that it recognises that the unmeasurable is what
they’re really fighting to understand” (Kahn, 1969).

Fig. 2 - Well-being spectrum from measurable (left) to unmeasurable or qualitative (right).

This definition of a well-being spectrum is helpful because it highlights that “comfort” lies at the
intersection between quantifiable parameters (e.g. temperature, luminance) and qualitative concerns
(e.g. beauty, perception). This is reinforced by the generally accepted definition of thermal comfort as
“a state of mind which expresses satisfaction with the thermal environment” (ASHRAE, 1992).
Similarly one could define visual comfort as a state of mind which expresses satisfaction with the
luminous environment. In both cases the most effective way to determine comfort is through a

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combination of measurable parameters of the environment and their correlation with reported comfort
by the occupants. What our and other research has demonstrated is that this correlation is critically
influenced by perceived control that the user has over their environment, particularly when the
physical conditions become distracting or extreme.

Happiness, is inevitable more difficult to define, but could be summed up as “the emotions
experienced when in a state of well-being… ranging from contentment to intense joy” (Wordnet,
2009). Clearly happiness, like beauty, can therefore only be determined as expressed by the building
occupants. This is an area of work that research is increasingly straying into.

In summary, the relationships between environmental design and the occupants are multifaceted and
of key importance to the performance of buildings. As a research field it is moving further in to the
direction of understanding human parameters, particularly in the territory of well-being. Let us now
look at some examples, drawn primarily from research at Cambridge, to explore the issues in more
detail under the headings of energy use and lighting.

Energy use

The energy performance of office buildings in use varies significantly from the predictions made in
energy simulation models. This variation has been estimated as being a factor of two by various
sources (Norford et al, 1994; Baker and Steemers, 2000; Bordass et al, 2004) and is generally
associated with human parameters of occupant and management behaviour. For domestic energy
demand identical buildings can vary by a factor of 6 (or more), primarily due to dramatically different
occupancy patterns for different households (e.g. single occupant commuting to work daily compared
to a family with 24 hours occupancy).In office buildings, the occupancy period is similar for most
buildings (e.g. 9am-6pm) and so we attribute the twofold energy increase to other largely behavioural
and control issues.

This doubling of office energy demand puts into question the absolute value of building energy
simulation if occupant behavioural parameters cannot yet be accounted for. Recent research by Yun
and others (Yun et al, 2008) at the Martin Centre and elsewhere (e.g. Rijal et al, 2008) has begun to
tackle this issue by developing new algorithms related to window opening behaviour and
implementing these algorithms in energy simulation software. These developments are indicative of
the current direction in people-centred building research.

On the one hand it is possible to demonstrate that the occupant can dramatically alter the energy
demand, and that this is stimulated by environmental parameters (e.g. Yun has shown the correlation
between indoor air temperature and likelyhood of the occupant opening a window). On the other hand,
research by Baker and others (e.g. Baker and Standeven, 1996; Guedes, 2000) has demonstrated that
occupants are more comfortable when they have increased freedom of choice to adapt their conditions
in a straightforward and intuitive way. They further demonstrated that small personal adaptive
changes (e.g. in clothing and position) could cumulatively lead to dramatic differences in comfort.

base case adapted case
air temp 30.5 28.0
rad temp 30.5 28.0
air speed 0.1 0.2
clo 0.5 0.4
met 1.2 1.1
Discomfort (PPD) 68.4% 17.5%

Fig. 3 - Data showing that small adaptive changes in human behaviour can radically alter comfort
(Baker and Standeven, 1996)

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Similarly, at the urban scale, it has been suggested that increasing diversity of environmental
conditions and the inherent freedom of choice that people in open spaces tend to have will increase
comfort (Steemers et al, 2004). This freedom of choice and adaptability that designs offer are thus key
parameters in determining comfort and overall satisfaction (or happiness). It is worth noting that the
improved comfort achieved in this way is independent of changes in physical parameters such as
temperature, air movement or luminance.

Recent work has demonstrated that energy demand in offices in a temperate climate does not correlate
with comfort or overall satisfaction (Manchanda, 2008). This might be surprising as one would expect
that the increased energy use should improve conditions. However, increased energy use is typically
associated with increased mechanical equipment and centralised control (e.g. air conditioning), which
tends to increase energy use and decrease options for user adaptation respectively in conventional
projects.

300

200
annual CO2 emissions (kg/m2)

100
ventilation type

NV

MM

0 AC
1 2 3 4 5 6 7

overall comfort (unsatisfcatory to satisfactory)

Fig 4. - Increasing energy use, expressed here in terms of CO2 emissions, for office buildings in the
UK does not appear to improve overall comfort (Manchanda, 2008)

This work has been developed in further detail and will be reported in due course. The evidence
points towards the fact that low energy design cannot be limited to the technical issues that impact on
our “planet”, but that “people” have a direct role. Occupants both affect the energy performance of
buildings and are also affected by the environmental conditions created. Their well-being is an
integral concern for sustainable design.

Lighting

Light and well-being are intimately connected. Light can impact directly in health, comfort and
happiness as outlined briefly here by way of an introduction. In layman’s terms, a lack of light at the
appropriate time of day can result in seasonally affective disorder (SAD). This is not an aspect I
intend to develop here, beyond suggesting that a well-daylit space, ideally facing the morning sun, can
provide valuable benefits to sufferers of SAD. Daylight, but also the quality of the view through a
window, has been associated directly with improving the healing process in hospitals. Increased
daylight may also reduce the reliance on electric light and can thus be advantageous in energy terms.
However, if the quality of light is perceived to be poor by the occupants (i.e. causing visual
discomfort or simply being boring) then the potential advantages of natural light can be undermined.
Finally, the way light is manipulated by architecture to reveal form, texture and colour, can reinforce a
sense of beauty and instil happiness.

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The purpose of this part of the paper is to show that quality of light is not closely related to standard
measures of light, and in particular daylight. Recent and current projects at the Martin Centre and
elsewhere are exploring light quality through a combination of metrics and user surveys (e.g. Parpairi
et al, 2002; Veitch et al, 2008). It is becoming evident that conventional measures of light, such as the
illuminance level, daylight factors, glare indexes, etc., do not explain how people perceive their
luminous environment or report on visual comfort.

It has been shown that diversity, quality of view and freedom of choice play important roles in the
perception of visual comfort (Parpairi, 2004). The conditions in a theoretically near-ideally daylight
interior (diffuse, glare-free, even and constant light) occupants reported lower levels of satisfaction
than in a glary and contrasting space. The key difference between the spaces is that in the
‘theoretically ideal’ space users had little freedom of choice to spatially adapt their visual
environment because the conditions were similar throughout the building. In the ‘technically inferior’
but more satisfying space, users could choose or could move to significantly different luminous
conditions, but they also had a high quality view out onto nature. This view provides them with visual
diversity, a connection to the outside, and an opportunity for psychological recovery or relief. This
last point of psychological recovery harks back to earlier work on health and physical recovery by
Ulrich (1984).

Parpairi et al (2002) went on to see if it was possible to define a quantitative measure of visual
diversity with the reported visual comfort of occupants. It was found that the ‘luminance variability’
was highly appreciated by the subjects. The more diverse the luminances in the visual field of view,
the more positive were the responses, to the extent that luminance variability alone could explain 42%
of the variance in occupant perception, whereas simple luminance ratios explain only 27% and the
Daylight Glare Index explains on 13%. Interestingly, artificial light was often used to compensate for
low visual diversity, and not solely for a lack of illuminance levels.

Fig. 5 - Linear regression results of overall reported occupant perception (‘final physical description
factor’) and a measure of luminance difference (‘LD45’) (Parpairi et al, 2002)

We are currently extending this research to gain further insights in to the perception of lighting quality
(DLL project, 2009). The methodology that is being adopted is a combination of physical
measurements, occupant and designer questionnaires, and digital photographic analysis of a series of
case study projects. One key challenge is that when the visual environment is broadly acceptable,
users either express no strong feeling (making it difficult to compare conditions or choices) or their
responses may be skewed by non-visual aspects (such as noise or thermal conditions). Although this
work is not yet complete, the emerging evidence supports the above findings that lighting, comfort
and happiness are strongly connected parameters. Thus the success of the luminous environment of a
building is determined by the user perception and not solely on rather crude metrics and regulations
currently used in design.

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Summary

This paper provides an overview for a more detailed oral presentation about the relationships between
sustainable design and well-being, with a particular focus on energy, lighting and comfort. Research
of occupant well-being –in terms of occupant health, comfort and happiness – can be shown to be
increasingly important as a research field and relevant to the performance of buildings. The ‘human
dimension’ of design requires the application of existing and new research methodologies to ensure
the advancement in knowledge of truly sustainable design. People effect and are affected by the built
environment and we ignore their role at our own risk.

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