In recent years, research has emerged to quantitatively and qualitatively understand occupants' interactions with buildings. However, there has been surprisingly little research on building interfaces and how their design, context (e.g., location), and underlying logic impact their usability and occupants' perceived control, as well as the resulting comfort and energy performance. Research is needed to better understand how occupants interact with building interfaces in both commercial and residential applications; both applications are important to address as there are many differences in interface types, level of control and understanding, and even expectations of engagement. This paper provides a cursory review and discussion of select common building interfaces: windows, window shades/blinds, thermostats, and lighting controls. The goal of this paper is to review literature related to these human-building interfaces to explore interface characteristics, current design and use challenges, and relationships between building interfaces and occupants. Human-building interface interactions are complex, more research is needed to understand design, use, and characteristics. Common themes emerged throughout the literature review to explain occupant interactions (or lack of interactions) with building interfaces, which included thermal and visual comfort, ease and access of control, interface/control placement, poor interface/control design, lack of understanding, and social-behavioral dynamics.

Abstract:In this work, the literature about the relationship between thermal comfort and productivity in workplaces is reviewed and explored by means of a co-citation analysis-i.e., a factor analysis applied to the mutual citations of the most relevant contributions. A structure of three main clusters of papers describing the relationships between workers' thermal comfort and productivity were identified according to the factor analysis and then confirmed with a multidimensional scaling. Results indicate that comfortable indoor thermal conditions can have beneficial impacts on workers' well-being and productivity, such as higher operational rates, lower production losses, fewer sick leaves, and reduced health related costs. Some authors proposed analytical and empirical expressions for the quantification of the impact of thermal comfort on productivity; nevertheless, due to the broad spectrum of activities and their applicability, the literature is still far from reaching a general consensus on the potential impact of comfort/discomfort on productivity and proposed models can vary significantly in the different studies.

In this paper, the authors provide a general overview on the methodological framework behind the monitoring and evaluation strategies of Mobistyle project that are used as reference for the demonstration cases. The strategies identify parameters that need to be evaluated during several phases regarding the impact (energy, IEQ, health, behavioural patterns) and the strategy (effectiveness of the process) of the project, and how these parameters can be numerically evaluated. In particular, the paper focuses on the graphical visualization method for behavioural patterns analysis in relation to indoor environment quality and energy use. The proposed approach is illustrated based on measured data from one Mobistyle Project case study i.e. a hotel for long term stay located in Turin, Italy.