WORKSPACE RECOMMENDATION FOR EDUCATIONAL BUILDINGS BASED ON THERMAL COMFORT AND PERSONALITY

Abstract

This study seeks to find the relationship between thermal comfort and personality traits of individuals so as to provide space recommendation for building occupants to improve thermal comfort of building occupants. Smart educational buildings can be created to address occupants’ thermal comfort needs. There have been studies showing the importance of occupant thermal comfort in buildings and how thermal comfort can affect productivity. With that in mind, it is crucial to ensure the thermal comfort of building occupants in workspace and educational building. Heating, Ventilation and Air Conditioning (HVAC) systems are widely used in buildings to ensure thermal comfort for occupants. However, building occupants do not feel thermally comfortable most of the time. Despite the increasing emphasis and research on thermal comfort in buildings, there lacks a study on individual thermal comfort level. Most studies focus changing the environmental settings to cater to all the occupants. The main objective of this paper is to provide workspace recommendation based on thermal comfort and personality. This bridges the gap between existing researches and future works to shift the focus of thermal comfort from physical attributes to individuals. The study used data collected by the Building and Urban Data Science Laboratory (BUDS Lab) at the National University of Singapore (NUS), School of Design and Environment (SDE). 17 participants were recruited but only 15 sets of data were used. The participants were tasked to do personality trait tests and thermal comfort surveys. It was found that “Highly Sensitive Person Scale” and “Emotional Stability” can be used to recommend workspaces for building occupants. Due to the small sample size, results from this study cannot be used to represent the whole Singapore population.