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The existing building stock is recognised as a major contributor to total energy consumption and related carbon emissions around the globe. There is increased attention on the retrofit of existing building stock, especially residential buildings, as a way of curbing energy consumption and carbon emissions. Within this context, human nature connectedness (HNC) has the potential of further amplifying the benefits of sustainable buildings both from an energy conservation practice and tangible improvements to users’ satisfaction, health, and wellbeing. This study attempts to show a case study of the potential of using HNC through the adoption of biophilic design principles to improve a residential building performance. A terrace house located in Sydney, NSW, was used as a case study and proposed retrofit scenarios were simulated with DesignBuilder® and Rhinoceros/Grasshopper with a view of improved daylighting, thermal comfort, and energy consumption. The building performance is improved in terms of daylighting, thermal comfort, and reduced energy consumption, additionally enhancing HNC.

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Environmentally sustainable design (ESD) was developed as a response to the increasing demands to address sustainability challenges within built environment (BE). BE stakeholders have already adopted ESD as a critical principle in their practices and it is crucial to embed ESD in preparing the next generation of BE professionals. In industry, various ESD frameworks have been developed and adopted to measure the success of design in terms of achieving sustainability. Similar frameworks have been used extensively to guide and scaffold learning for sustainable design in design studios. These frameworks offer predetermined sets of criteria to measure quantifiable building performance parameters. However, there have been growing concerns that the ESD frameworks do not help enhance human-nature connectedness (HNC), where attention was given to biophilic design (BD) to bridge this gap. Availability of few BD frameworks limits the opportunities to adopt them in ESD studios. Further, current BD frameworks focus on qualitative place-making aspects of building designs with less emphasis on quantifiable building performance. This is the critical challenge in teaching BD in ESD studios where the ESD frameworks are used as a central pedagogical tool to guide students' selfassessment, reflection and learning. This chapter reports on an educational design and research study that involved a systematic development of a pedagogical model for incorporating BD in ESD studios. We present here our conceptual and methodological work done as a part of this study consisting two steps. Firstly, we developed a general approach for designing and testing pedagogical innovations in ESD studios by combining educational design-based research and action research approaches. Secondly, we applied this general approach to creating a pedagogical model for teaching students to develop and use BD frameworks. The proposed general approach can be adopted in ESD studios for designing and testing other pedagogical innovations for ESD.

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