Center for the Built Environment

This paper reports on analysis of open-ended survey responses in a commercial building occupant indoor environment satisfaction survey database maintained by UC Berkeley. Building on past analyses of Likert-scale satisfaction ratings and categories of dissatisfaction on acoustics, temperature, lighting and overall building and workspace, we use text analysis software to enrich understanding of occupants’ perspectives on what matters about the buildings they work in, and why. These comments detail interactions between occupants and their physical environment, and reflect on expectations, stress, and concerns that lie outside dimension-by-dimension assessments of physical building characteristics. They thus speak to gaps between theories of how buildings work for their occupants and experiences of how they actually do. Together they assert the importance of user-centered views that are currently known through anecdote but poorly incorporated in more clinical or topdown views of building environments.