Extract

ABSTRACT: For the last four years the authors have been investigating the performance in
practice of a range of sustainable commercial and institutional buildings worldwide. These
investigations involved the principal author in one or more visits to each of the buildings and the
personal distribution and collection of a questionnaire survey seeking the users’ perceptions (on
a seven-point scale) of a range of factors: operational, environmental, personal control, and
satisfaction.

For this paper the authors focus on the users’ perceptions of the quality of lighting in their work
areas. The users’ overall perceptions of lighting conditions are presented and analyzed, first
with an overview of the average scores for each question, followed by a look at the shapes of
their distributions over the set of buildings, and then the results of some correlations between
Lighting Overall and a number of other key performance factors such as Health, Productivity
and OverallComfort. It was found that Lighting Overall was one of the higher scoring factors of
the Environmental category, and the average scores for the amount of natural and artificial
lighting were close to the ideal. However, direct glare from the lights and from the sun and sky
were noted as issues to be addressed.

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