Usability and comfort in Canadian offices: Interview of 170 university employees
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Increasing building automation to improve energy efficiency introduces a risk of reducing occupants’ perceived control and overall comfort. To this end, this paper presents a field study that used contextual techniques to explore the relationship between occupants’ perceived control and comfort, as well as their preferences for building automation. A total of 170 occupants in 23 Canadian university campus buildings were interviewed in their offices using semi-structured interviews. All interviews entailed verbally administering a survey while photographs were systematically used to identify the context of occupants’ interactions with building controls. Findings revealed that occupants’ perception of comfort was moderately correlated to their perception of control over their indoor environment. Occupants also showed an overwhelming preference for more control opportunities in their offices (e.g. operable windows and dimmable lighting controls). Conducting interviews in offices yielded many interesting anecdotes and enabled the researcher to identify contextual issues related to building controls’ accessibility, which may have been unnoticed otherwise. The findings of this research contribute to a broader debate within the research community about the appropriate level of building automation to optimize energy efficiency and occupant comfort.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".