Impact of blinds usage on energy consumption : automatic versus manual control

This paper reports a study on the impact of different usage patterns of an automated blinds system on the energy consumption for heating and cooling in a Dutch office building. A five-month observational field study in 40 offices resulted into a dataset on the blinds usage of four types of blind users. This data was used to simulate the effect of the blinds usage on the energy consumption for heating and cooling. The results of the field study show that a majority of the building occupants switched off the automatic mode of the blinds system permanently. The simulation results indicate that this significantly impacts the energy consumption in the building. The total daily average energy consumption for heating and cooling was significantly lower for occupants using the automatic mode than for the three groups of manual users (871W/day versus 2573W/day; T=-5.98, p=0.000)

Design as a Social Practice

In this chapter we present the findings of an investigation into the ways in which the discourses and practices of school design produce educational spaces which influence the discourses and practices of teaching and learning when the building is occupied. This investigation involved the development of a methodology for systematically analysing the relationship of school space to the experiences of students, teachers and parents. It expands notions of post occupancy evaluation (POE) research by exploring how the motives of an educational vision which informed an initial school design, those of the final build, and those of the people who occupy that building interact in a way which influences experiences of the end users. In this way we sought to understand more about the extent to which a building regulates or governs the behaviour of those who occupy it. Through our approach to multi-professional post occupancy evaluation we came to the view that a building may be understood as a tool which may be used to facilitate change rather than as an instrument of change. </p