Unlocking Human Factors for More Resilient and Sustainable Built Environments: Human Centric Solutions

Abstract

Sustainable buildings are designed to provide a better built environment that reduces environmental impacts, supports communities for social needs, and preserves economic gains. Despite a growing interest in sustainable development over the past few decades, there has been surprisingly little research focusing on the implications of human factors to a sustainable built environment. Sustainable building solutions shall be informed by the needs of building occupants and made in adaptive response to environmental, economic and socio-cultural changes. Interactions between users and buildings are of great importance to determine how successful a sustainable building is. Literature revealed that a failure of putting users at the pinnacle of designing sustainable solutions could be one of the main underlying reasons of underperformance of sustainable buildings. This paper presents a conceptual framework to demonstrate how human centric solutions contribute to improving user-environment interactions in sustainable buildings. By considering human centric solutions, sustainable building performance can be optimised by integrating users’ needs and aspirations into the design and development process. This paper helps increase the understanding of the roles of human factors in sustainable buildings, hence supporting the development of social sustainability which has been greatly overlooked in the pursuit of sustainable development.