Developing Habitability Information for the Design of Office Environments

摘要

Habitability research deals with efforts to discover the impact of the environment on the behavior of the user/occupants in terms of their welfare, task performance, and satisfaction. In administrative facilities such as offices, data from users can be used to discover factors of habitability, such as privacy, space, view, noise, or image. Information about these environment factors can then be applied to interior design solutions to improve the habitability for other office occupants. The methodology of this type of field research is to: (1) analyze results from before-and-after evaluations of renovations, and (2) use the analysis to generate design guidance for the layout and design of generic workstation configurations. Interpretation of the research results yielded three kinds of applicable information: (1) understanding of office layouts and workstation evaluations for purposes of possible revision of the existing NAFEC design, (2) the possible development of generic guidance for office design relating to generalizable factors of habitability, and (3) development of quantitative methods of relating habitability factors to environmental components in terms of stimulus-response interactions.