An inquiry into the certification potential of built environments’ affordance

Abstract

Buildings are typically equipped with a number of elements and devices (e.g., windows, blinds, luminaires, radiators) to control indoor environmental conditions. The availability, effectiveness, and usability of control devices and their interfaces constitute an essential aspect of built environments’ quality. This aspect has been sometimes referred to as indoor-environmental “affordance” (or “ecological valency”) and can be interpreted as a descriptor of buildings’ responsiveness toward inhabitants’ needs and requirements. However, in contrast to some other building quality aspects such as energy efficiency, there is a lack of systematic evaluation or certifications procedures for objective characterization of indoor environments’ affordance as related to the availability and effectiveness of control devices and their human interfaces. This paper entails an exploration of the potential for and associated challenges of designing and implementing affordance measurement and certification procedures. Challenges include, above all, assigning relative weights and coefficient values to different domains (e.g., thermal, visual, acoustical), devices, and levels of their effectiveness. Irrespective of their success to date, attempts toward operationalization of indoor-environmental affordance can be quite beneficial: The affordance framework can offer a systematic, intuitive, and compact framework to guide the workflow toward the provision and maintenance of adequate indoor environments for human occupancy.