Recent ucbarchitecture_oapdeposits items

Demonstrating the reliability of randomized measurement and verification for switchable control retrofits using a large open-source dataset

Fri, 5 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Conventional measurement and verification (M&V) methods for estimating energy savings rely on comparing pre- and post-retrofit performance. They are often time-consuming and unreliable, especially when non-routine events, such as step changes or more gradual changes in building operation, occur during the M&V process. When those events are unrelated to the retrofit intervention and significantly affect building energy consumption, the results will be confounded when the analyst applies the conventional M&V method. In this study, we demonstrated that switchable interventions, such as most HVAC control retrofits, can benefit from a new M&V method that randomly samples whether to implement the baseline or the intervention strategy at a fixed interval (e.g., daily). We tested this novel randomized M&V method on a large public dataset (hourly energy data over 2 years for 639 buildings) covering various climate zones and commercial building types, using a virtual...

Envelope-Driven Comfort Risk in Residential Demand Response

Fri, 5 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Residential demand response (DR) is a valuable resource for grid reliability, but remains challenging because the highly heterogeneous residential building stock leads to widely varying and hard-to-predict load and comfort responses during DR events. Although prior research has estimated the technical potential of DR-capable technologies for achieving energy demand savings, little is known about how they affect thermal comfort. In particular, it remains unclear how indoor thermal conditions due to DR depend on the thermal envelope characteristics of the housing stock. To address this gap, this study provides a systematic, location-specific assessment of indoor thermal performance during DR-events across the US housing stock using both typical DR weather data and detailed building metadata. We evaluate how envelope characteristics influence indoor temperatures during realistic simulated summer and winter DR events across 37 US locations, applying both temperature threshold and...

Personal comfort systems for adults with intellectual disabilities

Fri, 5 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This study examines how personal comfort systems (PCS) support thermal adaptation among adults with intellectual disabilities living in energy-poor households in Chile. Participants (n = 8) in two identical social-housing units completed two in-home field campaigns: winter (June–August 2023; 10 weeks) and summer (December 2023–March 2024; 14 weeks). The study combined an adapted daily point-in-time thermal comfort questionnaire, continuous indoor dry-bulb temperature monitoring (15 min), and pre-/post-season interviews. Indoor conditions frequently fell outside reference comfort thresholds (92.6% of winter temperatures < 21.5°C; 64.1% of summer temperatures > 26°C). Using participant-level paired comparisons with thermal preference ‘No change’ as a comfort proxy, PCS use showed no systematic winter increase (median Δ = –0.014; p = 0.944) but a consistent summer increase (median Δ = 0.126; p = 0.014). Interview accounts indicated that PCS supported everyday adaptation, while...

From ‘What-is’ to ‘What-if’ in human-factor analysis: A post-occupancy evaluation case

Fri, 5 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Human-factor analysis typically employs correlation analysis and significance testing to identify relationships between variables. However, these descriptive (‘what-is’) methods, while effective for identifying associations, are often insufficient for answering causal (‘what-if’) questions. Their application in such contexts often overlooks confounding and colliding variables, potentially leading to bias and suboptimal or incorrect decisions. We advocate for explicitly distinguishing descriptive from interventional questions in human-factor analysis, and applying causal inference frameworks specifically to these problems to prevent methodological mismatches. This approach disentangles complex variable relationships and enables counterfactual reasoning. Using post-occupancy evaluation (POE) data from the Center for the Built Environment’s (CBE) Occupant Survey as a demonstration case, we show how causal discovery generates testable hypotheses about intervention hierarchies and...

Conformal 3D printing on bending-active formwork - exploring a new approach to the fabrication of wide-spanning structures

Wed, 20 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This study introduces a novel methodological framework that combines bending-active structures with conformal 3D printing to address current limitations in architectural-scale additive manufacturing. Traditional horizontal slicing and planar layer deposition present inherent constraints for fabricating large-span elements such as roofs and floor slabs, while conventional approaches to curved forms typically require resource-intensive formwork. We propose an integrated approach that utilizes bending-active structures as material-efficient substrates for 3D printing, potentially serving dual roles as both formwork and supplementary reinforcement. The methodology incorporates a multi-axis robotic platform alongside preliminary design, software, and hardware adaptations to enable material deposition that follows structural force vectors. Through initial experimental studies at various scales, we examine the fundamental aspects of this approach – including material testing, formwork...

Automatic Simplification Of Complex Building Geometry For Whole-building Energy Simulations.

Wed, 20 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Automatic Simplification Of Complex Building Geometry For Whole-building Energy Simulations.

Earthquake Loss Estimates and Policy Implications for Nonductile Concrete Buildings in Los Angeles

Mon, 13 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The collapse potential of nonductile concrete buildings represents a substantial life safety hazard globally that can be mitigated through carefully crafted policy. Mitigation policy should be approached incrementally by (1) understanding problem scale, (2) screening for low‐ and high‐risk buildings, (3) performing engineering analysis for potentially vulnerable buildings, and (4) retrofit or replacement of high‐risk structures. This research addresses initial stages of this sequence for Los Angeles, California. The intent was to investigate approaches for informing mitigation priorities by: characterizing the inventory of approximately 1,500 pre‐1976 concrete buildings; estimating risk, including identification of building types that contribute most substantially to the risk; and investigating the impact of retrofit policy alternatives. Loss estimates for scenario events are based on the HAZUS™ Advanced Engineering Building Module. Depending on model assumptions, losses range...

Rethinking resilience policy and practice

Mon, 13 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The concept of resilience has become a part of the larger discourse not only for the engineering professions involved in the design of buildings and infrastructure, but also for disaster researchers in many academic fields as well as policymakers in governments at the local and national levels. The concept has evolved significantly over the past 10–20 years. In the early 2000s, the engineering community was coming to grips with the two paradigms of resilience: (1) a more technical approach to design that focused on predictability and stability in a steady state; and (2) a broader definition originating in systems theory and ecology that focused on the ability to reorganize while undergoing change. The concept of resilience continues to be redefined, in part because of the human and community impacts highlighted by the COVID pandemic, and natural and climate-induced disasters. Recent experience suggests that there are gaps in the narrower technical/engineering framing of resilience...

Influence of overhead HVAC and aerosol control strategies on coarse mode particle dispersion and exposure in a full-scale room experiment

Thu, 2 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Coarse mode respiratory aerosols can carry viral loads over long distances and have very different dynamics than submicron particles, but experimental studies under realistic conditions remain limited. To study the differential impacts on exposure under different mixing conditions, we co-released 7–10 µm particles and carbon dioxide (CO2)—which served as an indicator of gas and submicron particle dynamics—in a 158 m3 room at LBNL’s FLEXLAB facility with an overhead heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) system. The room was arranged as a distanced meeting then a classroom with eight heated manikins and a researcher. Spatial variability was measured using 16 particle counters and 22–26 CO2 sensors throughout the space. Conditions included: HVAC off or supply air at 1000-1060 m3 h-1 at neutral, cooling, or heating temperatures; with and without 20% outdoor air; and added HVAC filtration, portable air cleaners (PACs), or a physical barrier between the speaker and occupants....

Enduring empire: U.S. statecraft and race-making in the Philippines

Fri, 30 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Enduring empire: U.S. statecraft and race-making in the Philippines

A hypergraph model shows the carbon reduction potential of effective space use in housing

Thu, 11 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Humans spend over 90% of their time in buildings, which account for 40% of anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions and are a leading driver of climate change. Incentivizing more sustainable construction, building codes are used to enforce indoor comfort standards and minimum energy efficiency requirements. However, they currently only reward measures such as equipment or envelope upgrades and disregard the actual spatial configuration and usage. Using a new hypergraph model that encodes building floorplan organization and facilitates automatic geometry creation, we demonstrate that space efficiency outperforms envelope upgrades in terms of operational carbon emissions in 72%, 61% and 33% of surveyed buildings in Zurich, New York, and Singapore. Using automatically generated floorplans in a case study in Zurich further increased access to daylight by up to 24%, revealing that auto-generated floorplans have the potential to improve the quality of residential spaces in terms of environmental...

Structural design as a cost competitive and scalable carbon mitigation strategy

Wed, 10 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The built environment is responsible for a large percentage of the global carbon footprint. Many generations of structural designers have developed material and structural systems for the efficient use of natural resources and low-carbon designs. The accumulated present knowledge we have today around material efficiency would be sufficient to design and build with a much lower carbon footprint, if it weren’t for a major constraint: cost. However, current construction economics do not account for the real costs of materials, including their environmental externalities. Considering the actual societal costs associated with embodied carbon emissions could suddenly make material efficiency and low carbon materials more economical. In this paper, we compare the cost of carbon avoidance or storage in the built environment through structural design with other carbon capture technologies. We show how financial incentives for low-carbon design could support carbon reduction targets and...

Measuring What Matters: A Benchmarking System for Occupant Satisfaction with Workspace Environments

Mon, 27 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Occupant satisfaction with the physical environment of the workplace is a key metric of office building performance. To date, no clear consensus exists on how to fairly compare satisfaction levels between buildings or benchmark workspace designs. This study analyses 93,153 Post-Occupancy Evaluation (POE) survey responses from the United States, Australia, Japan, and Singapore to identify systematic differences between countries and establish empirical benchmarks across key aspects of office workspaces. Results show that Singaporean offices achieve the highest overall workspace satisfaction (79%), followed by the United States (68%), Australia (65%) and Japan (39%). The United States and Australian databases display broadly comparable patterns across workspace aspects, with only minor differences in temperature, acoustics, and privacy. In contrast, significant differences are observed in the Japanese and Singaporean datasets compared with Western counterparts. Rather than applying...

Structures and Architecture

Thu, 31 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

From Wood to Tree explores designing with wood’s natural degradation processes. This case-study proposes a sustainable approach for reintegrating processed preprocessed lumber into forest ecosystems, highlighting the importance of deadwood in supporting nutrient cycling, fostering fungal growth, enhancing soil health and providing habitats for saplings, animals, seeds, and other living organisms essential to local forest ecologies. This design-research study establishes a framework for re-evaluating conventional approaches to material circularity, which predominantly emphasize material preservation. Instead, it proposes an alternative perspective that integrates biodegradation as a fundamental process in ecological and architectural design.

Improving Air Quality using Smart Thermostats: Minimizing Indoor Exposure to Wildfire-Generated Fine Particulate Matter (PM2.5)

Thu, 3 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Fine particulate matter (PM2.5) contributes to millions of excess deaths worldwide each year. Wildfires are a major source of PM2.5 and sheltering indoors using central air filtration is effective in reducing indoor PM2.5 levels during an event. We analyzed smart thermostat usage in California homes during the 2020 wildfire season and found that central air is not generally utilized for air filtration. We evaluated the effectiveness of operating central air systems to reduce indoor PM2.5 levels using a mass balance model. Simulation results showed up to a 56% reduction in indoor PM2.5 during wildfire days from central air filtration. Installing a MERV 13 filter, as opposed to a MERV 10 filter, can further lower indoor PM2.5 concentrations by up to 31%. Using central air systems for filtration can match the efficiency of four portable air cleaners in an average Californian home. These results may serve as the basis for an automated control logic to utilize central air filtration...

Cooked Air

Thu, 22 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Since 1996, ASHRAE Standard 62.2 has provided guidelines for residential ventilation. As ventilation becomes increasingly scientised, quantifiable, and reliant on hyper-specific equipment, technical literacy on ventilation has narrowed. The relationship between architecture, inhabitants and air management has become increasingly reliant on ventilation standards, in turn increasing reliance on technical specialists, and creating a gap in ventilation knowledge. Through an examination of ASHRAE Standard 62.2, this essay asks why is it that, as ventilation processes become increasingly measurable, there is an equal tendency to reverse awareness in relation to the human sensation, when the standard itself underlines the reality of both phenomenal and intellectual knowledge towards air quality assessment. Furthermore, if architecture’s domain centres on formal, aesthetic, and material logics, is an expanded literacy on air management necessary to address mechanical equipment within...

Collective Comfort: A Public Program for Heat Resilience

Thu, 22 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

American desert cities designed and built at the turn of the century, in collaboration with the advent of air-conditioning technologies, have been able to house millions of Americans by relying primarily on fossil-fuels to supply relief from extreme hot weather. The Phoenix Metro Area, or The Valley of The Sun as it is known to locals, experienced 145 days reaching tempera-tures over 100˚F in 2020 according to the National Weather Service. In July of 2023, Phoenix set a new record with 31 days straight of over 110-degree heat. The increased probability of a longer-lasting heat-wave, combined with the over demand of electrical power supply during extreme weather events can be catastrophic, especially to the most vulnerable communities.2 As climate change intensifies, desert cities like Phoenix must innovate and adapt, ensuring the safety and well-being of all residents, particularly those in high-risk areas.

From Exigent to Adaptive

Thu, 22 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The divorce between the disciplines of architectural design and systems engineering in conjunction with the scientisation of comfort-standards encourages a year-round and day-round comfort routine to the contemporary human. In his proposal for Air Architecture, French artist Yves Klein proposes the opposite: an architecture devoid of the responsibility to temper human environs. Mechanical machinery enables an architecture to come, while Klein’s proposal for an Architecture of Air imagines a future adaptive-human. Before the popularisation of interior weather, Native populations employed adaptations, or experience a ‘change of human sensitivity’, much like native plants and animals do in order to survive their environment, much like the transformation that Klein describes. In a world where resource reduction and scaremongering tactics regarding climate change do not accomplish enough, we must think towards a more enriched human existence, for a thriving, strengthened human race....

The Unbearable Tightness of Building

Thu, 22 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The Unbearable Tightness of Building

Embodied carbon in mechanical, electrical, and plumbing systems: A critical literature review

Thu, 27 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The environmental impacts of mechanical, electrical and plumbing (MEP) systems have been largely overlooked and are commonly excluded from building-scale life cycle assessments (LCAs). Understanding the impacts and reduction potential of these systems is crucial for decarbonizing retrofits and new buildings. Therefore, we have conducted a critical review of LCA studies on MEP systems in buildings, selected using a systematic method, to identify: 1) estimates for upfront embodied [A1-A5] and replacement [B4] carbon impacts; 2) LCA reporting fundamentals needed to ensure transparency and interpretability of results; 3) future research directions. Since 2016, 54 studies presented sufficient information to investigate presented methodologies and LCA results of MEP systems. The review reinforces the need to report environmental impacts by individual life cycle stages and building or system elements to interpret influencing factors and enable further utility of results. Two studies...

Air pollutant exposure concentrations from cooking a meal with a gas or induction cooktop and the effectiveness of two recirculating range hoods with filters

Tue, 5 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0000

This study compares air pollutant concentrations resulting from cooking with gas or induction cooktops, with or without either of two recirculating range hoods with filters. A meal of pasta, plant-based “meat” sauce and stir-fried broccoli was cooked three times for each cooktop and hood combination in a 158 m3 room. Time-resolved measurements were made of nitrogen oxides (NOX), carbon dioxide (CO2), size-resolved particles, and speciated volatile organic compounds (VOCs) during cooking and 30 minutes after cooking. Cooking with induction used half as much energy, produced no discernible NOX, and significantly reduced ultrafine particles (UFP, diameter < 100 nm) and CO2 compared to gas cooktops. Induction produced statistically higher PM2.5 when calculated using size-resolved particle measurements from one pair of instruments, but the difference was not discernible when calculating from another pair. With gas cooktops, roughly half of the PM2.5 was in particles smaller than...

Assessing the impact of glazing and window shade systems on view clarity

Sat, 17 Aug 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Windows provide access to daylight and outdoor views, influencing building design. Various glazing and window shade materials are used to mitigate glare, overheating and privacy issues, and they affect view clarity. Among them, we evaluated the effect of window films, electrochromic (EC) glass, and fabric shades on view clarity. We conducted an experiment with 50 participants using visual tests adapted from clinical vision tests (visual acuity, contrast sensitivity, color sensitivity) and images displayed on a computer monitor in a controlled laboratory. Window films and EC glass tints outperformed fabric shades in visual acuity, contrast sensitivity and view satisfaction with the exception of the darkest EC tint state and dark grey VLT 3% shade for color sensitivity and view satisfaction. The EC tints pose internal reflection issues and fabric shades are preferred for visual privacy. Window films and EC glass hinder participants’ blue–green color discrimination while fabric shades...

Hot, cold, or just right? An infrared biometric sensor to improve occupant comfort and reduce overcooling in buildings via closed-loop control

Tue, 30 Jul 2024 00:00:00 +0000

To improve occupant comfort and save energy in buildings, we have developed a closed-loop air conditioning (AC) sensor-controller that predicts occupant thermal sensation from the thermographic measurement of skin temperature distribution, then uses this information to reduce overcooling (cooling-energy overuse that discomforts occupants) by regulating AC output. Taking measures to protect privacy, it combines thermal-infrared (TIR) and color (visible spectrum) cameras with machine vision to measure the skin-surface temperature profile. Since the human thermoregulation system uses skin blood flow to maintain thermoneutrality, the distribution of skin temperature can be used to predict warm, neutral, and cool thermal states. We conducted a series of human-subject thermal-sensation trials in cold-to-hot environments, measuring skin temperatures and recording thermal sensation votes. We then trained random-forest classification machine-learning models (classifiers) to estimate thermal...

Indoor environmental quality in WELL-certified and LEED-certified buildings

Sat, 20 Jul 2024 00:00:00 +0000

International building certification systems, such as the WELL and Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) standards, play a pivotal role in the design of healthy and sustainable buildings. While LEED adopts a holistic approach to designing healthy and sustainable buildings, the WELL standard has a strong emphasis on human health, comfort, and well-being. Although prior research has revealed inconsistent results for occupant satisfaction in office buildings with WELL certification compared to buildings without WELL certification, or are certified using another certification system (e.g., LEED), most of these comparisons tend to lack methodological rigor. This study used a statistical procedure to match and compare 1634 occupant surveys from LEED-certified buildings to 1634 surveys from WELL-certified buildings. Six important architectural and experiential parameters were matched, masking their influence on the outcome. Overall building and workspace satisfaction was...

Experimental investigation of large-scale flow structures in an aircraft cabin mock-up

Wed, 6 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000

The purpose of this study was to investigate the influence of large-scale circulation on the flow field in a cabin mockup. The velocity was measured by ultrasonic anemometers (UA). Then, this study analyzed the turbulence kinetic energy spectra of the velocity fluctuation signal. The turbulence kinetic energy spectra of the measurement points reflect the flow characteristic of the large-scale circulation in the cabin mockup. The results contribute to the understanding of the role of the thermal plume on the large-scale circulation in the cabin. The large-scale circulation's impact on air quality was also investigated, and the contaminant distribution was measured using tracer gas in the cabin. The two large-scale circulation interactions made the air flow mixing approximately uniform.

Evaluation of aerosol transmission risk during home quarantine under different operating scenarios: A pilot study

Wed, 6 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000

SARS-CoV-2 has been recognized to be airborne transmissible. With the large number of reported positive cases in the community, home quarantine is recommended for the infectors who are not severely ill. However, the risks of household aerosol transmission associated with the quarantine room operating methods are under-explored. We used tracer gas technique to simulate the exhaled virus laden aerosols from a patient under home quarantine situation inside a residential testbed. The Sulphur hexafluoride (SF₆) concentration was measured both inside and outside the quarantine room under different operating settings including, air-conditioning and natural ventilation, presence of an exhaust fan, and the air movement generated by ceiling or pedestal fan. We calculated the outside-to-inside SF₆ concentration to indicate potential exposure of occupants in the same household. In-room concentration with air-conditioning was 4 times higher than in natural ventilation...

The Chinese thermal comfort dataset

Sat, 28 Oct 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Heating and cooling in buildings accounts for over 20% of total energy consumption in China. Therefore, it is essential to understand the thermal requirements of building occupants when establishing building energy codes that would save energy while maintaining occupants’ thermal comfort. This paper introduces the Chinese thermal comfort dataset, established by seven participating institutions under the leadership of Xi’an University of Architecture and Technology. The dataset comprises 41,977 sets of data collected from 49 cities across five climate zones in China over the past two decades. The raw data underwent careful quality control procedure, including systematic organization, to ensure its reliability. Each dataset contains environmental parameters, occupants’ subjective responses, building information, and personal information. The dataset has been instrumental in the development of indoor thermal environment evaluation standards and energy codes in China. It can also...

Energy savings and thermal comfort in a zero energy office building with fans in Singapore

Thu, 28 Sep 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Elevated air movement produced by fans can offset air-conditioning energy requirements by allowing temperature setpoints to be raised without compromising thermal comfort. These advantages are even greater in hot and humid climates that inherently have large and sustained indoor cooling requirements. Few studies have assessed the in-situ benefits of fans in actual buildings. We installed ceiling and desk fans into a Zero Energy office building (675 m2) in Singapore. Across an 11-week period, 35 occupants alternated between two conditions (no fan vs. fan): 24 °C setpoint with fans off, and 26.5 °C setpoint with fans on. When the temperature setpoint was raised and elevated air movement was provided, a 32% energy reduction was obtained. The energy savings accrued without any negative impacts occurring on thermal satisfaction. Overcooling caused by thermal preference to slightly warmer and warmer conditions was substantially reduced from 33 to 9%. No changes in perceived air-staleness...

Personal comfort models based on a 6‐month experiment using environmental parameters and data from wearables

Fri, 7 Jul 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Personal thermal comfort models are a paradigm shift in predicting how building occupants perceive their thermal environment. Previous work has critical limitations related to the length of the data collected and the diversity of spaces. This paper outlines a longitudinal field study comprising 20 participants who answered Right-Here-Right-Now surveys using a smartwatch for 180 days. We collected more than 1080 field-based surveys per participant. Surveys were matched with environmental and physiological measured variables collected indoors in their homes and offices. We then trained and tested seven machine learning models per participant to predict their thermal preferences. Participants indicated 58% of the time to want no change in their thermal environment despite completing 75% of these surveys at temperatures higher than 26.6°C. All but one personal comfort model had a median prediction accuracy of 0.78 (F1-score). Skin, indoor, near body temperatures, and heart rate were...

Solar optics-based active panel for solar energy storage and disinfection of greywater

Sat, 6 May 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Smart city and innovative building strategies are becoming increasingly more necessary because advancing a sustainable building system is regarded as a promising solution to overcome the depleting water and energy. However, current sustainable building systems mainly focus on energy saving and miss a holistic integration of water regeneration and energy generation. Here, we present a theoretical study of a solar optics-based active panel (SOAP) that enables both solar energy storage and photothermal disinfection of greywater simultaneously. Solar collector efficiency of energy storage and disinfection rate of greywater have been investigated. Due to the light focusing by microlens, the solar collector efficiency is enhanced from 25% to 65%, compared to that without the microlens. The simulation of greywater sterilization shows that 100% disinfection can be accomplished by our SOAP for different types of bacteria including Escherichia coli. Numerical simulation reveals that...

Resilient cooling strategies – A critical review and qualitative assessment

Wed, 7 Dec 2022 00:00:00 +0000

The global effects of climate change will increase the frequency and intensity of extreme events such as heatwaves and power outages, which have consequences for buildings and their cooling systems. Buildings and their cooling systems should be designed and operated to be resilient under such events to protect occupants from potentially dangerous indoor thermal conditions. This study performed a critical review on the state-of-the-art of cooling strategies, with special attention to their performance under heatwaves and power outages. We proposed a definition of resilient cooling and described four criteria for resilience—absorptive capacity, adaptive capacity, restorative capacity, and recovery speed —and used them to qualitatively evaluate the resilience of each strategy. The literature review and qualitative analyses show that to attain resilient cooling, the four resilience criteria should be considered in the design phase of a building or during the planning of retrofits....

Cohort comfort models — Using occupant’s similarity to predict personal thermal preference with less data

Mon, 28 Nov 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Cohort Comfort Models (CCM) are introduced as a technique for creating a personalized thermal prediction for a new building occupant without the need to collect large amounts of individual comfort-related data. This approach leverages historical data collected from a sample population, who have some underlying preference similarity to the new occupant. The method uses background information such as physical and demographic characteristics and one-time onboarding surveys (satisfaction with life scale, highly sensitive person scale, personality traits) from the new occupant, as well as physiological and environmental sensor measurements paired with a few thermal preference responses. The framework was implemented using two personal comfort datasets containing longitudinal data from 55 people. The datasets comprise more than 6000 unique right-here-right-now thermal comfort surveys. The results show that a CCM that uses only the one-time onboarding survey information of an individual...

Diurnal trends of indoor and outdoor fluorescent biological aerosol particles in a tropical urban area

Thu, 8 Sep 2022 00:00:00 +0000

We evaluated diurnal trends of size-resolved indoor and outdoor fluorescent biological airborne particles (FBAPs) and their contributions to particulate matter (PM) within 0.5-20 μm. After a ten-week continuous sampling via two identical wideband integrated bioaerosol sensors, we found that both indoor and outdoor diurnal trends of PM were driven by its bioaerosol component. Outdoors, the median [interquartile range] FBAP mass concentration peaked at 8.2 [5.8-9.9] μg/m³ around sunrise and showed a downtrend from 6:00 to 18:00 during the daytime and an uptrend during the night. The nighttime FBAP level was 1.8 [1.4-2.2] times higher than that during the daytime, and FBAPs accounted for 45 % and 56 % of PM during daytime and nighttime, respectively. Indoors, the rise in concentrations of FBAPs smaller than 1 μm coincided with the starting operation of the heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) system at 6:00, and the concentration peaked at 8:00 and dropped...

Predicting Window View Preferences Using the Environmental Information Criteria

Thu, 18 Aug 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Daylighting standards provide an assessment method that can be used to evaluate the quality of window views. As part of this evaluation process, designers must achieve five environmental information criteria (location, time, weather, nature, and people) to obtain an excellent view. To the best of our knowledge, these criteria have not yet been verified and their scientific validity remains conjectural. In a two-stage experiment, a total of 451 persons evaluated six window view images. Using machine learning models, we found that the five criteria could provide accurate predictions for window view preferences. When one view was largely preferred over the other, the accuracy of decision tree models ranged from 83% to 90%. For smaller differences in preference, the accuracy was 67%. As ratings given to the five criteria increased, so did evaluations for psychological restoration and positive affect. Although causation was not established, the role of most environmental information...

A Global Building Occupant Behavior Database

Fri, 15 Jul 2022 00:00:00 +0000

This paper introduces a database of 34 field-measured building occupant behavior datasets collected from 15 countries and 39 institutions across 10 climatic zones covering various building types in both commercial and residential sectors. This is a comprehensive global database about building occupant behavior. The database includes occupancy patterns (i.e., presence and people count) and occupant behaviors (i.e., interactions with devices, equipment, and technical systems in buildings). Brick schema models were developed to represent sensor and room metadata information. The database is publicly available, and a website was created for the public to access, query, and download specific datasets or the whole database interactively. The database can help to advance the knowledge and understanding of realistic occupancy patterns and human-building interactions with building systems (e.g., light switching, set-point changes on thermostats, fans on/off, etc.) and envelopes (e.g.,...

Hippie modernism: Curation and knowledge production

Wed, 10 Nov 2021 00:00:00 +0000

The provocative notion that hippies constituted a twentieth-century architectural avant-garde was implied in the exhibition title: Hippie Modernism: The Struggle for Utopia. This chapter examines how contemporary curatorial practices of material culture research and knowledge co-production informed the exhibition’s 2017 restaging at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA). It recast the museum as a laboratory in which Bay Area public discourse about its counterculture heritage was mediated through the curatorial mediation of objects, texts, and creative acts. Do-it-yourself (DIY) practices and its synergies across creative media ranging from ‘underground’ printing to ‘outlaw’ building. Both invoked an assemblage sensibility that went beyond mere style to invoke what Jane Bennett calls the “agency of assemblages,” that is, the collectivity of people and things in ad-hoc collaboration. When artifacts of the counterculture’s outlaw production are assessed, expressions...

Field investigations of a smiley-face polling station for recording occupant satisfaction with indoor climate