On occupant behavior and innovation studies towards high performance buildings: a transdisciplinary approach

Abstract

With ever-increasing population and urbanization, it is crucial to decrease energy density in the built environment without sacrificing occupants’ comfort and well-being. This requires consideration of technological developments along with the human factor in order to achieve environmental and social sustainability. Two major contributors to the development of conceptualizations for human-centric technologies are behavior and innovation (B&I) studies. Behavior studies aims to explain individualistic or society-based dynamics of human behavior whereas the innovation studies focuses on social, economic, organizational, and regulatory dimensions and processes of inventive activity. If these studies are incorporated into the hardcore architecture and engineering disciplines with a transdisciplinary approach, the orchestration of occupant behavior and the innovative technologies would be possible, which in turn significantly enhance the comfort and energy efficiency in built environments. This paper aims to provide an overview of interdisciplinary dialog between B&I studies and underlines the role of their collaboration to leverage transdisciplinary research on human-building interaction for energy efficiency. The approach presented here is structured as a conceptual framework and named the ‘socio-technical core’ (STC). STC is to lead to more organic articulation of energy efficiency innovations with real life and pave the way for higher level of acceptance. In order to have a ‘big-picture’ for the well-accepted conceptualizations and the current status of interdisciplinary dialog, we provide a review of (B&I) theories and models along with network analysis of key concepts. Then we investigate the potential directions of future transdisciplinary efforts by discussing the influences of B&I studies to each other for application to energy efficiency studies. In order to put the analysis in a firm background, we provide a case study for thermostat, which can be considered as a product improved with B&I approaches during last decades. We also discuss the benefits of B&I based transdisciplinary research perspective by referring to few examples in literature and the points emerged in this study.