Lighting conditions in sustainable buildings: results of a survey of users’ perceptions

For the last 4 years, the authors have been investigating the performance in practice of a range of sustainable commercial and institutional buildings worldwide. These investigations involved the principal author in one or more visits to each of the buildings and the personal distribution and collection of a questionnaire survey seeking users’ perceptions (on a 7-point scale) of a range of factors: operational, environmental, personal control and satisfaction. For this article, the authors focus on users’ perceptions of the quality of lighting in their work areas. The users’ overall perceptions of lighting conditions are presented and analysed, first with an overview of the average scores for each question, followed by a look at the shapes of their distributions over the set of buildings and then the results of some correlations between lighting overall and a number of other key performance factors such as health, productivity and overall comfort. It was found that lighting overall was one of the higher scoring factors of the environmental category, and the average scores for the amount of natural and artificial lighting were close to the ideal. However, direct glare from the lights and from the sun and sky were noted as issues to be addressed.