PREAMBLE

This project text has been further developed since the concept was first proposed in 2023. It benefitted from an initial brainstorming session at the Annex 79 expert meeting in Aachen, Germany (June 2023), where ideas for future topics were collected, and from numerous online discussion sessions that followed. On this basis, a concept proposal was developed and presented to the EBC and Users ExCo meetings in November 2023. The proponents were encouraged to increase the representation of new disciplines (e.g., social sciences) and to clearly articulate the fundamental research questions early in the project. A planning workshop with 30 diverse experts was held in Boston in early April 2024 to synthesize the proposal further. The proposed new project will be presented at the June 2024 EBC and Users ExCo meetings. Herein, the joint proposed EBC Annex/Users Task is referred to as ‘Network” for branding purposes.

PROPOSED NETWORK IN BRIEF

Building upon the success of Annex 66 and 79, this new joint EBC/Users project will research the evolving role of humans in the energy transition to address climate change. As building envelopes and mechanical and electrical equipment become more efficient, the influence of occupants on building energy consumption becomes increasingly significant - from everyday behaviors and purchasing decisions to how they act within buildings, interact with each other, cope, and survive during extreme events. The energy transition is not solely about the building inhabitants; it will also impact every stakeholder involved in the building's life cycle, from designers to operators.

Modern trends, particularly post-COVID, such as teleworking, co-working, and home-sharing have led to diverse occupancy patterns, differing from standard schedules. Moreover, with rising global expectations for comfort and the introduction of various new technologies, there is a pressing need to re-evaluate how humans, in their various roles, are integrated into building design and operation and how energy use patterns are affected. As such, this proposed project focuses on four key areas of intersection: 1) human-building interactions at the individual scale; 2) human-building interactions at the community scale, 3) building (re)design; and 4) building operations. Despite some apparent topical overlap with ongoing and newly proposed IEA TCP projects, there is one critical distinction of the proposed project: humans. The proposed Network seeks to develop new knowledge, technologies, and policy recommendations to design and operate buildings that allow humans to thrive in the face of climate change and the corresponding global movements (e.g., energy transition) seeking to adapt to it.

BACKGROUND AND JUSTIFICATION

Humans play an integral role in building performance and adaptation to climate change ⎯ across both spatial and temporal scales. Considering the breadth of stakeholders in the built environment, people affect the market and design for new buildings, building construction, and the operation and management of buildings through their life cycle. In residential buildings, the owners or tenants are also the operators and make decisions about renovations and retrofits. In non-residential buildings, operators are usually distinct from the occupants and hold significant power over operating conditions and the resulting environmental performance. In a rapidly changing climate, these diverse stakeholders hold the key to achieving optimal levels of performance as defined by the following dimensions:

• Resilience and adaptability to a changing climate and extreme events
• Equitable allocation of building space and access to comfortable/healthy spaces
• Mitigation of climate change

While the above objectives are widely studied (e.g., in EBC Annexes), the focal point is rarely the human dimension. Thus, this new proposed Network places humans at the center of the challenge and flips the paradigm, treating humans as the solution rather than the problem (e.g., the cause of the performance gap). It is a natural extension of Annexes 53, 66, and 79 - all of which made major headway in developing new knowledge and methods to design and operate buildings more optimally considering people, their needs, and their impact on performance.

Most recently, efforts led by IEA EBC Annex 79 yielded the following major outcomes:

• New knowledge, ontologies, and methods to understand multi-domain comfort and its role on occupant behavior in buildings
• An occupant behavior database and library of data-driven modeling tools to model occupant behavior at various scales (from room to city), where data is obtained from novel methods such as social media and advanced sensing technologies
• An open-source book that provides new methods (and case studies to demonstrate those) for occupant-centric simulation-aided building design
• Definitions, methods, and case studies for best practices in occupant-centric control

However, Annex 79 researchers and other experts identified major gaps in knowledge, methods, and policies that necessitate a follow-up project. The focal areas and planned approaches include:

• How to design buildings and communities for comfort and well-being (and how to quantify these characteristics), while ensuring other priorities like environmental impact are managed (including through communication with occupants to promote certain behaviours)
• How to ensure that resources and considerations are allocated equitably, through the lens of sufficiency (i.e., a bottom-up approach that asks: what do people need from their buildings?)
• How to design/retrofit buildings considering climate change and extreme events, while considering multiple stakeholders (e.g., buildings are usable and comfortable for occupants, occupants are not disturbed during retrofits, retrofits are economically viable for owners)
• How to operate buildings (and provide affordances to occupants to operate buildings) under climate change and extreme events

Annex 79 also gained new insights about organization, dissemination, and multidisciplinary research that will be implemented, including:

• Actively recruiting from underrepresented disciplines (e.g., social sciences, health sciences, urban planning, computer science, climate science) to ensure that the research is state-of-the-art and considers all critical angles
• Shifting focus from literature reviews and position papers to more forward-looking and action-oriented approaches (demonstration projects, tool development, guidelines and policy recommendations, etc.)
• A subtask structure (described further below) that more actively facilitates multidisciplinary research and mobility between subtasks

OBJECTIVES AND SCOPE

Objectives

The overall goal of the new Network is to:

Determine the role that occupants and building stakeholders must play to facilitate the energy transition while adapting to our changing climate. We also aim to develop, demonstrate, and deploy approaches to improve occupants’ comfort, well-being, and health in buildings, using principles of sufficiency and equity.

To achieve the above goal, the following objectives will be addressed:

1. Gain knowledge about how building occupants around the world respond to changing climate conditions, particularly extreme events, and how they are currently adapting to the energy transition, including new technologies (e.g. heat pumps) and programs (e.g. demand response);
2. Establish working definitions and key performance indicators (KPIs) to evaluate sufficiency, equity and resilience in buildings;
3. Develop recommendations for building design and retrofit which address principles of resilience, sufficiency and equity for a changing climate;
4. Examine the role that behavioural nudging of building operation (through building automation systems or other means of providing real-time information) can play in helping to keep occupants safe in extreme events and comfortable during normal operation; and
5. Explore how communities and social infrastructure can establish community and individual resilience in the face of climate change.

Scope

This Network investigates the intersection of building design, retrofit, and operation with occupant and stakeholder needs amidst the energy transition and climate change. Its primary focus is enhancing building resilience, occupant comfort, and health while ensuring energy efficiency and equity.

Key areas of exploration include adapting to future climate scenarios, understanding changing occupant demographics, and integrating new technologies and energy solutions. The Network will utilize interdisciplinary insights to develop practical, sustainable solutions for the building sector.

The outcomes will inform standards and codes, demonstrating the compatibility of energy efficiency with occupant well-being in a changing climate. Research will incorporate methods from engineering, architecture, information technology, psychology, and health and social sciences, providing comprehensive solutions for building design and occupant adaptation to climate change.

ORGANIZATIONAL STRUCTURE

To achieve the above aims, and to understand the role that occupants and building stakeholders must play in the energy transition while adapting to our changing climate, the following fundamental and applied research questions have been established to guide the work conducted in this IEA research network.

Overarching research questions:

• How do people interact with their buildings, (and why) under “normal” conditions?
• How do these behaviors change under extreme conditions driven by climate change, and how do humans react under unprecedented conditions?
• Do these behaviors help or hinder their ability to survive and thrive?
• How will extreme events specifically impact building function (and IEQ, comfort, health)?
• What is the boundary or expectation, and/or the design and policy implications that might result from these conditions and behaviors (e.g., at what point must comfort expectations shift due to a changing climate and the energy transition)?
• How do occupant expectations of buildings need to shift given the capabilities we have now? How do designers, building operators, communities, etc. expectations need to shift?
• How do we design and (re)design buildings to accommodate this new normal?
• How do we design better buildings for people, especially under changing conditions and climate while also promoting health and well-being?

To effectively answer these overarching research questions and to maximize interdisciplinarity and collaboration, a two-by-two subtask structure is envisioned in which we aim to holistically understand buildings and those who design, build, live, and work in them over a range of conditions and scales throughout the buildings’ lifecycles.