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Developing a child-friendly post-occupancy assessment methodology for sustainable schools

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conference contribution
posted on 2011-10-06, 10:36 authored by Andrea Wheeler, Dino Boughlagem, Masoud Malekzadeh
This paper explores the development of post-occupancy evaluation (POE) methodologies for working with children and school buildings and discusses why a tailored, child-friendly method is important for both understanding and assessing the efficient use of energy. It presents work carried out in a series of workshops with pupils in 3 case study UK schools in the East and West Midlands and South Yorkshire. Whilst POE methods generally allow examination of the physical, technical and management factors influencing the actual performance of building, they can also be adapted to examine the gap between predicted and actual energy performance of a building and human behaviour is key in such investigations. Moreover, using action research-based participatory and collaborative methods in POE provides a way to explore knowledge and attitudes towards low carbon buildings influencing behaviours. Understanding why our energy use and our relationship with natural resources have to change raises complex social issues but new school environments provide a unique opportunity for feedback methods not only to improve the performance of 'sustainable' architecture, but also to examine and influence adoption of sustainable lifestyles. This paper reports our finding from PostOPE, a research project currently being run by the Civil and Building Engineering Department at Loughborough University.

History

School

  • Architecture, Building and Civil Engineering

Citation

WHEELER, A., BOUGHLAGEM, D. and MALEKZADEH, M., 2011. Developing a child-friendly post-occupancy assessment methodology for sustainable schools. IN: 3rd International Conference on Applied Energy (ICAE 2011), Perugia, Italy, May 16th-18th, 21pp.

Version

  • VoR (Version of Record)

Publication date

2011

Notes

This is a conference paper presented at the 3rd International Conference on Applied Energy (ICAE 2011), Perugia, Italy, on May 16th-18th

Language

  • en