Understanding human-building interactions under multimodal discomfort

Abstract

The uncertainty in occupants' interactions with building systems and occupant-related factors influence the accuracy of building energy consumption estimates. Individual interactions are hard to predict, however, interaction related trends and patterns for groups of building occupants that could be retrieved from empirical studies could potentially provide insight regarding human-building interactions (HBIs) (i.e., occupants' interactions with built environments). Thus, in this study, we measured human response to multimodal sensory discomfort (i.e., multimodal perception of visual and thermal discomfort) in a simulated single occupancy office. We used perceptual decisions of occupants as enablers to understand HBIs at a micro-level. We identified the number, type, kind, hierarchical order, occurrence probabilities, patterns, response time of decisions as markers of response in a between-subjects experiment with 90 participants. We statistically analyzed two conditions (no discomfort and multimodal discomfort) with regards to participants' responses. Our results show that HBI decisions in the no discomfort condition and multimodal discomfort condition are significantly different with regards to type (i.e., thermal and visual) and kind (e.g., blind, desk fan) of immediate decisions. We also found that decisions in the no discomfort condition are very diverse across the participants and potentially reflect occupants’ thermal and visual preferences. On the other hand, the decisions in the multimodal discomfort condition reflect emerging responses of participants to address the multimodal discomfort.