A Key to Make Sustainable Buildings People Centric: User-environment Interactions

Sustainable buildings are designed not only to reduce environmental impacts but also to promote health and wellbeing. A range of studies illustrated that user behaviours can significantly affect the performance of sustainable buildings in meeting the goals. Significant performance gaps are found if users fail to conform with the ways sustainable buildings are designed to. It is therefore critical to examine if the prevalent sustainable building solutions meet the evolving needs and expectations of people. This paper explored the relationships between users and environment in sustainable buildings and determine its user-environment interactions. A survey method was used to collect data from users of selected sustainable buildings. The results show that respondents generally agree sustainable building solutions can enable meaningful user-environment interactions and improve user satisfactions. User-environment interactions can be greatly promoted if users are provided an authority to adapt to changes in response to different building conditions and external factors. The findings however showed that there is a gap in existing sustainable building systems to capture the implications of users’ behaviours on the building usage pattern in adaptation to its environment. The paper demonstrated the importance of examining user-environment interactions in sustainable buildings to advance the goals of sustainable development. With an improved understanding of user-environment interactions, a more people-centric approach can therefore be built into the development of sustainable buildings and unlock the next-level values of sustainable built environment.