Abstract
Smart and sustainable buildings have been designed, built and utilized in order to consume less energy, facilitate efficient building operation, and improve the comfort, health and productivity of users. Hence, they become a critical component of smart cities. Nonetheless, perceived importance rankings of different features of smart and sustainable buildings have yet to be identified and prioritized from the users’ perspective. Based on responses from 494 building users in Hong Kong, it was found that building users tended to focus more on intelligent security systems, followed by intelligent and responsive fresh air supply and lifts and escalators. On the other hand, building users generally considered the systems that monitor people’s movement and harvest rain water to be the least important features. Exploratory factor analyses were used to identify key factors of perceived smartness and sustainability of a building. The results of factor analyses showed that different user groups would characterize a building’s smartness differently.
Highlights
Smart and sustainable buildings have attracted considerable attention in recent years
32 percent of the respondents worked in the engineering and construction services industry, followed by 20 percent working in the information and communications industry
The ranking of perceived importance indicated that acoustic, indoor green, and social environment were considered as secondary features and the item “a responsive acoustic environment” was dropped in all factor analyses due to its low communality, the exploratory factor analyses (EFA) results indicated that indoor ecology and social spaces have an impact on users’ perceived smartness of smart and sustainable buildings
Summary
Smart and sustainable buildings have attracted considerable attention in recent years. According to a report published by BSRIA [1], the smart building market alone was projected to grow from US$427 billion in 2011 to US$1036 billion by 2020, thereby creating vast opportunities to develop and apply advanced building technologies, and information and communications technologies (ICT). China will account for a 46% market share in the global smart building industry [1]. Smart and sustainable buildings are the ones that through their physical design and ICT installations are responsive and adaptive to the changing environment and needs of users throughout their lifetimes. Because of the adaptive nature of smart and sustainable buildings, the usage of materials, water, and energy resources can be optimized while comfortable and healthy indoor environments can be achieved [2,3,4]. As a building block of smart cities, smart and sustainable buildings promote sustainable urbanization, healthy life style, and social inclusion [5,6,7,8]
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