POE Framework for Assessing User Connectivity of Intelligent Buildings

In the last decade, the focus of building research has slowly shifted from sustainable building to Intelligent Building (IB) and both concepts are expected to merge in order to cater to the growing requirement for a better, productive and efficient environment comprising of functionality; safety-security; thermal, acoustical, indoor air-quality, visual comfort and building integrity etc - without consuming excessive energy. Many of these requirements are indicators of user satisfaction falling under the realm of IB and were beyond the scope of the preceding era of sustainable building research. With time, definition of IB has changed from purely technical to more humane - driven by fast-paced information and communication technology or ICT. Today's IB is primarily user-oriented and its success factor relies on its active interaction with occupants or user-connectivity. Hence, IB demands systematic evaluation of its performance by its users. Unfortunately, such feedback is not very structured in case of IB which differs significantly from its traditional counterpart. As a result, Post Occupancy Evaluation (POE) - a highly acknowledged evaluation tool used by occupants of conventional building has been implemented in many IBs with certain level of compromise. To bridge this knowledge gap, this research proposes the conceptual POE framework exclusively designed for IB. After considering intelligent attributes and their influence on user-connectivity, the framework is planned which is suitable for indicative level POE study for lighting system (representative of a traditional system) and access control system (representative of a smart system). It was noted that in the first case, traditional POE is insufficient and needs to incorporate the intelligent features. In the second case, there is a conflict of interests of user-connectivity and system performance. As more buildings are adopting IB environment and more designers are considering seriously the notion of feedback, the proposed model can be beneficial for a knowledge-based paradigm shift of the building industry.