Julia K. Day remembers the moment she got interested in understanding how people use architecture. Day, who is now an assistant professor in Washington State University’s School of Design and Construction, was a design student studying a new high-performance building in Spokane, Washington. The building had an interface designed to let people know when it was environmentally ideal to open the windows rather than use the A/C. When the conditions was right, a green light would come on–supposedly letting people know they should open their windows.
Supposedly. No one she talked to even knew the system existed. “They thought it was part of the fire alarm system,” Day recalls over email. “Some people didn’t even know they could open their windows! I remember thinking, ‘This is crazy. The owner probably spent a lot of money to have this fancy system installed, and no one even knows what it is.'” It was a classic example of the mismatch between the way today’s most efficient and advanced buildings are designed, and how people actually end up using them.
In a new study in Energy Research & Social Science, Day and coauthor William O’Brien, an associate professor at Carleton University in Ottawa, describe the results of seven previous studies focused on the occupants of different high-performance buildings in Washington and Ottawa over the past five years. By looking at multiple studies, they draw out the ways that surveys of inhabitants can often reveal things that purely numbers-based post-occupancy studies can’t. As they explain, “oftentimes researchers ask the questions of ‘what,’ ‘how many,’ and ‘how often?’ Yet, we often neglect to ask the ‘why’ questions.” The stories themselves are remarkable. Many are not only tributes to advanced architectural technology–but also the ingenuity of occupants who “hack” it.
“You’ve got to keep in mind we’re a bunch of liberal college-educated people who like the idea of a green building,” one occupant tells Day and Williams, explaining why they kept their windows open even when the building’s energy interface recommended that they keep them shut for maximum energy savings. “We had parties when it was built. But we’re still human animals and so we get really crabby. And too hot.”
Anyone in the tech industry might recognize the idea of talking to occupants as a core principle of great user experience, or UX–understanding the way people use a product, not the way it was designed to be used.
Day and O’Brien advocate for architects and builders to not only involve occupants early on in the design process, but also perform these more qualitative forms of post-occupancy evaluation and share their results. “These stories tend to be very descriptive, provide greater insight about occupant mentality, and are likely to remain memorable long after statistical results have been forgotten,” they point out in the study. No one forgets the image of a dozen scientists sitting stock still in a room until the lights go off, or a Drinking Bird bopping in an office hallways in the middle of the night. Funny though they are, they impact the quantitative performance of the building.
There are plenty of reasons why user research isn’t as common in architecture, ranging from the fact that isn’t always clear who should pay for such studies, to murkier issues of culture and how designers perceive their responsibility to their users once the building is finished (though that perception may be changing). But whatever the reason, as architecture comes alive with new technology, it needs its own UX breakthrough, a set of best practices that establish not only how an occupant might like a building to act, but also how a building itself can explain to a user why it’s designed a certain way–and how to control it. In short, it needs a model for human-architecture interaction.
In the meantime, Day plans to continue studying the way people use advanced building technology. “In fact,” she adds, “if anyone that reads this wants to participate in a research study for their building, please feel free to contact me!”