Introducing the qualitative performance gap: stories about a sustainable building

ABSTRACT

In the design and operations industries, the performance gap is a common discrepancy found between predicted building energy performance and actual energy performance. The performance gap is considered to have negative impacts for the brand of ‘green’ buildings, designers and operators. A socially based analogue is proposed here: the qualitative performance gap, defined as the perceived gap between what inhabitants expect and their actual experience of the building environment. This concept is explored at a regenerative Living Lab: the Centre for Interactive Research on Sustainability (CIRS) in Vancouver, Canada. ‘Official’ and ‘lived’ stories about the building were interpreted from sources of building information and interviews. Expectations about and forgiveness of building performance were gained from pre- and post-occupancy evaluations and interviews. The solution to the qualitative performance gap is not to eliminate it, but, in line with the concept of interactive adaptivity, to use the gap to generate new stories and new consequences for human wellbeing. The qualitative performance gap is thus conceived as positively generative, of new stories of place and identity. This work recommends crafting an ‘official story’ of social aspirations, and a communication feedback loop amongst designers, operators and building inhabitants, transparently sharing successes and failures.

KEYWORDS:

• branding
• expectations
• gap analysis
• performance gap
• post-occupancy evaluation (POE)
• pre-occupancy evaluation
• social context
• storytelling
• sustainable buildings

Acknowledgements

John B. Robinson was formerly professor at the Institute for Resources, Environment and Sustainability, University of British Columbia (1992–2016), and served as the director of the Centre for Interactive Research on Sustainability (CIRS).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. See https://sustain.ubc.ca/our-commitment/campus-living-lab/.

2. Two inhabitant workshops were run in July 2011 for volunteer prospective occupants of CIRS. The workshops were initiated by Julia Reckermann for her master’s research, and presentations were given by individuals listed in Table 2.

3. See http://cirs.ubc.ca/building/building-overview/.

4. The sustainability charter was an early initiative, drafted for potential inhabitants, intended to gain signature in order to entail commitment to pro-environmental behaviour during inhabitancy at CIRS. However, the elements of choice, obligation, incentive and penalty deemed inherent to such a charter (and that could not be enforced) were under contention throughout its development. Although presented and discussed at the inhabitant workshops, the charter has been neither ‘implemented’ nor developed further. Instead, it remains a concept and a draft document that in a future iteration may be intended as a ‘welcome’ package that portrays a vision about being an inhabitant of CIRS.

5. This estimated total population is a daily average taken midway through the month of survey implementation. It was calculated by Stefan Storey of Vancouver-based Sensible Building Science using a then-unpublished method that relies on a calibration of information technology data against number of manual counts of devices in the building. See https://www.cisco.com/c/dam/en/us/solutions/collateral/enterprise-networks/mobility/sbs-cmx-whitepaper.pdf/.

6. For information about lighting and ventilation controls, see http://cirs.ubc.ca/building/building-manual/project-design/.

7. In this case includes also the university, client visionary and students conducting research.