Impact of Furniture Layout on Indoor Daylighting Performance in Existing Residential Buildings in Malaysia

Abstract

Currently, home-based computing workspaces have developed substantially all over the world, especially in Malaysia. This growing trend attracts computer workers to run a business from their residential units. Hence, visual comfort needs to be considered in addition to thermal comfort for home workers in their residential working rooms. While such rooms are always occupied with furniture, the layout of the furniture may influence the indoor daylighting distribution. Several various furniture layouts can be arranged in a residential working room. However, to have better generalisation, this study focused on the impacts of mostly-used-furniture-layouts (MUFLs) on indoor daylighting performance in residential working rooms. The field measurement was conducted in a typically furnished room under a tropical sky to validate the results of the simulation software under different sky conditions. Then, daylight ratio (DR), as a quantitative daylighting variable, and the illuminance uniformity ratio (IUR), CIE glare index (CGI), and Guth visual comfort probability (GVCP), as qualitative daylighting variables, were analysed through simulation experiments. In conclusion, by changing the furniture layout, daylight uniformity recorded the highest fluctuations in the case room among all variables. While various furniture layouts, in a residential working room in the tropics, may even slightly reduce the extreme indoor daylight quantity, they can worsen the indoor daylight quality compared to an unfurnished space. The paper shows that furniture as an interior design parameter cannot help to improve tropical daylighting performance in a building.

Evaluation of occupants’ well-being and perception towards indoor environmental quality in Malaysia affordable housing

“…Visual comfort or luminous comfort is one of the factors that impact the perception of the occupants towards the IEQ. It consists of aspects such as daylight (Giarma et al , 2017; Mousavi et al , 2018), electrical or artificial lighting, (Giarma et al , 2017; Nimlyat and Kandar, 2015), glare (Giarma et al , 2017; Kamaruzzaman, 2017), colours and appearances (Kamaruzzaman, 2017; Mousavi et al , 2018). Mousavi et al (2018) stated that daylighting is a major aspect under the category of IEQ since a quarter total points of the GBI scoring for residential buildings focuses on the daylighting.…”

“…It consists of aspects such as daylight (Giarma et al , 2017; Mousavi et al , 2018), electrical or artificial lighting, (Giarma et al , 2017; Nimlyat and Kandar, 2015), glare (Giarma et al , 2017; Kamaruzzaman, 2017), colours and appearances (Kamaruzzaman, 2017; Mousavi et al , 2018). Mousavi et al (2018) stated that daylighting is a major aspect under the category of IEQ since a quarter total points of the GBI scoring for residential buildings focuses on the daylighting. According to the Illuminating Engineering Society as cited by Shishegar and Boubekri (2016), daylight is defined as the art and practice of admitting sunlight, diffuse skylight and light reflection from the outside into the building to contribute to the lighting requirement while artificial lighting is a light source that can control which provide constant amount of light.…”

“…This connection shows that the visual aspects of IEQ do affect the occupants significantly. To improve this, as stated by Mousavi et al (2018), several aspects of visual comfort should be considered during the designing process of the affordable building in the future, such as the wall-to-window ratio, window orientation, glazing, and solar shading.…”

Impact of Internal Shading Controls on Efficient Daylighting in Home-Office Workspaces in Tropical Climates

“…According to Figure 5, the modelled room is divided into three zones to show daylight levels for different spaces from the window. While every furniture layout may influence daylighting performance in residential buildings [37], it is not practical to generalize furniture arrangements for daylighting studies. The design parameters in this study were chosen from those with a high potential of being implemented in retrofit projects.…”

Optimum Glazing Configurations for Visual Performance in Algerian Classrooms under Mediterranean Climate

“…The average daylight factor (DF) represents the architectural quality of buildings and is one of the most widely used simulation outputs. The DF is a common method that determines the availability of daylight in a room [9,10]. The DF is expressed as a percentage and is defined as the ratio of interior illuminance on a horizontal surface E(int) to the exterior illuminance on a horizontal surface E(ext) under standard CIE overcast sky conditions, By definition, DF should be calculated only under the CIE overcast sky condition.…”