Indoor environment improvement in Malaysia's office buildings via Post Occupancy Evaluation

Abstract

The indoor environmental factors considered in office building must be determined in order to meet user's requirement. Disruption of indoor environment may constitute to reduce occupants' efficiency and work productivity. But the question is, how to ensure that the provision of indoor environmental aspects achieve high satisfaction to the building user? Therefore, Post Occupancy Evaluation (POE) is a prominent tool that indicates satisfaction and comfort level needs by building occupants as lessons learned to identify problems in indoor environment. By using occupants as benchmark of evaluation, the potential of improving the indoor environment in buildings is enormous. With relation to the title, the main purpose of this study is to provide recommendation to improve quality of indoor environment in office building, by analytical study on the level of effort and phases of conducting POE and determining occupant's satisfaction level. The survey used in conjunction with physical measurements to determine how environmental factors affect occupants' perceived comfort and productivity levels, and a benchmarking example of using the survey to establish how new buildings arc meeting a client's design objectives. It is recommended the application of POE is prioritized as continuous activity in environmental evaluation. © 2009 Faculty of Construction and Land Use, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University.