Architectural, indoor environmental, personal and cultural influences on students’ selection of a preferred place to study

Abstract

This paper aims to better understand the human inhabitation of buildings through an investigation of the influences of architectural order, indoor environmental as well as personal and cultural variables on student’s selection of a preferred place to study. The approach for this interdisciplinary inquiry is based on Integral Sustainable Design in combination with a simplified version of Integral Methodological Pluralism using methodologies from the disciplines of architectural design, architectural science and psychology. The results indicate that participant’s preferences emerged out of either personal or collective cultural narratives. The integral approach was useful to identify collective preference patterns as well as deviations from these and to understand why they occur. Important influences on participant’s selection of their preferred place to study were spatial characteristics, in particular a balance of prospect and refuge as well as individual past experiences, and the nature of the given task in this case study.

KEYWORDS:

• Integral sustainable design
• integral methodological pluralism
• occupant behaviour
• cultural narratives
• architectural order
• thermal comfort
• visual comfort
• prospect and refuge

Acknowledgements

We would like to acknowledge our friend and colleague Dr Lucy Zinkiewicz, particularly, her contribution to this project. Lucy was essential in bringing this multidisciplinary research together and played a great role in both conceptualising the project at its early stages as well as collecting the data. Unfortunately, Lucy passed away suddenly in mid-2018 and therefore was unable to see the completion of this project. We would therefore like to dedicate this paper in her honour.

We would also like to thank our colleagues Prof. Mark Luther and Tim Clark for advice on indoor environmental measurements as well as Deakin students Simone Knott and Salomé Bricker for their support with the project. This project is a contribution to the International Energy Agency IEA Annex 79 project ‘Occupant-Centric Building Design and Operation’.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Deakin University under the Faculty of Science, Engineering and Built Environment Research Grant Scheme 2018.