A comparison of lighting control strategies for open offices

Abstract

Providing environmental control to users in multi-user offices has long being considered not done. One of the reasons is it was believed that personal control in an open office would rather create conflict among office users than bring benefits. However, a number of experimental studies conducted to explore the experience of personal control of lighting in open offices start building empirical evidence that can help more informed decision-making. This paper presents the results of the second field experiment conducted as part of a larger study exploring the experience of personal control in a multi-user open office context. The experiment showed that despite users having diverse lighting preferences, provision of control even in a multi-user office resulted in a higher satisfaction with the lighting environment than in an office with a fixed light level. The study evaluated three personal control strategies. The results did not deliver evidence of benefits of the control strategy “control set-point” in which the user selected light level was treated as a set-point for daylight regulation. The results showed that when the system remembered the last level set by the user it resulted in a smaller amount of user actions executed using personal control and the resulting lighting conditions in the office better reflected individual preferences compared to the “forgetting” strategy in which the system was resetting overnight to its default state. The results were significant only with respect to satisfaction with daylight in favor of the system remembering the user set light level.