91视频

Judith Heerwagen has examined green building practices for years, first as a researcher at the University of Washington and later as a private consultant. She is now a high-performance green building program expert for the U.S. General Services Administration.

Her perspective on green building comes from training in environmental psychology.

鈥淚 got into it through an interest in habitat selection in animals. I’ve always been interested in the links between an animal and their environment, or people in their environment,鈥� Heerwagen said.

Through her work at the GSA, Heerwagen is involved in conducting research and creating policies for federal office buildings, particularly in how designers and building managers can encourage occupants to maximize high-efficiency design.

91视频: Why do designers need to involve the people who use the buildings in energy reduction discussions?

Judith Heerwagen: There is a concern as we’re moving toward zero-energy buildings that the building design alone can’t do net-zero; you’ve got to bring people into the equation. It’s people who use energy doing their work, and most of the time energy is not something they think about. Energy consumption is something that helps them do their work; it’s not an end in itself. To get people to even think about it, you’ve got to enter them into the loop really early. A lot of times the technology just lands in the office, and nobody talks about what it is they’re doing and why they’re doing it.

I did some work years ago on new daylighting technologies that turned off overhead lights when sensors said the daylight was sufficiently high. What happened, inevitably, is that people covered the sensors up or they dismantled them. The system just turned the lights off suddenly. People were very irritated because it dramatically changed the amount of light on their workspace, and people’s eyes don’t adjust rapidly enough to that. They perceived it as not enough light for their work.

What that told the designers and manufacturers of this is that we need to think how it is that we’re dimming those lights. The idea is that if you dim them there’s less of a perceptual difference so that people will not notice the dramatic change in light level. That was one place where research really did inform the design of the equipment itself.

And that’s the lesson 鈥� there just has to be involvement with people. They need to know why something is being done. They need to be trained if it’s something they need to be trained to use. They need help during an adaptation period.

91视频: How do you address energy use on an individual-user level?

Heerwagen: You also have to ask what occupants themselves can control. We’ve got an experiment going on right now at an EPA building in Denver in which we are letting people have access to the information about how much energy they’re spending and then giving them tips about how they could reduce their energy use. And then we’re starting a competition among 鈥減ods鈥� of six workstations. We’re trying to get people to compete with all the other pods in the building to reduce their energy.

91视频: There have been a number of competitions aimed at energy reduction in buildings. Is there a way to know if they’ve been successful?

Heerwagen: For the duration of the competition, it does work. It can save significant amounts of energy, anywhere from 10 percent up to 50 percent of the electricity load in buildings if you can get people to turn off devices, both at the workstation level and the big items like computers and printers.

The competitions are generally very successful. The question is what happens when the competition stops. Is this a behavioral change that is real, or does it need to be incentivized all the time with competitions or something like that? We don’t know the answers to those questions yet.

91视频: You have explored the idea of using shared or unassigned workspaces. How does that relate to reducing energy consumption?

Heerwagen: A lot of work that GSA and many others have done has found that a lot of workstations are empty. You’re heating the whole building and lighting the whole building, and less than half of the people are in the building, at their workstations, at any given time. That’s a major component of this thing that sometimes gets put to the side and not really examined, but it’s a really important part of being more efficient in terms of environmental performance.

To address this, there’s a real effort now to be much more efficient about space use, and to look at flexible work as a whole. Some people work from home sometimes; some people work out in the field with clients. These people may not need a dedicated workstation if they’re not there all the time.

91视频: What does a flexible workspace design look like?

Heerwagen: GSA is involved with a lot of private-sector partners on this, trying to figure out how to design a workplace in a way that takes into account the mobility of people.

One experiment is taking place in the GSA regional office in Denver. That building has three or four different workstation types, and people decide which one that they want to use. Some of these are mobile 鈥� they’re not in the office very often, so they have little drop-in stations, called 鈥減erches.鈥� Others, depending on what type of work they do, might have a slightly larger workstation, because they have lots of paper that they need to review. Others might be smaller because they work primarily on their computers.

We know you have to devise a space that has a variety of places where people can work, depending on their needs.

That experiment is a real attempt to reduce the space and have people take part in deciding what it is they think they can work best with. There are lots of mobile technologies being implemented to make it easier for people to move around. Nowadays, we don’t need technologies to be in a particular place; we can take them with us.

You might find that at a building level you might use more energy per square foot, but if you change that calculation to energy per person you’ll find that’s where the savings are. You’re saving by reducing your overall footprint.