Climate change, the need to curb energy use and carbon emissions, and the imperative to provide healthy and safe living conditions to all, are among the vital challenges we have to address today. In addition, the recent coronavirus disease (COVID19) pandemic, due to the spread of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, is threatening our safety at a global scale. Buildings can shelter us, elevate us, be places of community and refuge; yet, they may threaten our life, wall us off, isolate us, and harm our very habitat. Scientific evidence has also shown that most of our building stock has relevant shortcomings (e.g. poor heating, ventilation and lighting, dampness, pollutants) that can deteriorate the health of building inhabitants. With the forces of climate change, pandemics, population growth, and urbanization creating unprecedented challenges the decisions we make today to shape the buildings of our future will determine our collective welfare for generations to come. This is what the Smartness, Health Assessment and Performance Evaluation (SHAPE) project aims to address. In this era, we focus on energy transition, low carbon built environment and nearly Zero Energy Buildings (nZEBs). Enhancing experience of inhabitants - comfort, satisfaction, health, and well-being - is significant as well as achieving energy efficiency, smartness and high environmental quality in buildings. No comprehensive post-occupancy evaluation tool (POE) is yet available to systematically assess, in a robust and non-intrusive way, the performance of healthy and smart nZEBs from the perspective of inhabitants, and effectively combine assessment of inhabitant experience, energy efficiency, smartness, and environmental quality in building design, management and operation.
SHAPE project aims to propose, deploy, and validate a new post-occupancy evaluation tool for healthy and smart nZEBs, tracking holistically and assessing rigorously inhabitant comfort, satisfaction, health, and well-being, alongside buildings’ energy efficiency, smartness and environmental quality. The objectives of the project are (O): O1) build a framework of key performance indicators to evaluate comfort, satisfaction, health, and well-being of inhabitants alongside energy efficiency, smartness and environmental quality of buildings; O2) define and test objective and subjective measurement methods to robustly collect building and inhabitant data in a non-intrusive way; and, O3) propose the integration of a new post-occupancy evaluation tool into building standards, rating systems, and into the practice of the construction industry.
