Executive summary: there are a number of projects either underway or under discussion to reduce energy consumption in the Forum and improve the comfort of its occupants. The notes of the latest Post Occupancy Evaluation meeting explain some of the thinking behind the list.
For the longer story, read on…
Post Occupancy Evaluation (POE) is, according to Preiser et &al., cited in Wikipedia,
the process of evaluating buildings in a systematic and rigorous manner after they have been built and occupied for some time.
In a presentation at the Mainstreaming POE meeting at the Lighthouse, Glasgow in 2009, Bill Bordass and Adrian Leaman propose that the main key questions addressed by POE are:
1. How is this building working?
2. What do people think about it?
3. How does this relate to client and design intent?
4. How can this building be improved?
5. How can future buildings be improved?
The presentation gives examples of buildings that do not perform as designed, demonstrating the importance of POE.
What’s this to do with us? The same Bill Bordass has been undertaking a POE of the Potterrow Development (i.e. the Informatics Forum and Dugald Stewart Building) for the University and Bennetts Associates, the Forum’s architects. You may remember filling in a questionnaire in July 2011 about your perception of the building. The responses to this survey, and other data will be presented in the report.
In the process or writing the report, Bill Bordass has had a number of meetings with staff from Estates & Buildings, Informatics and PPLS. At these meetings several energy-saving and comfort-improving ideas have been discussed and actions have been agreed on, as detailed in the notes of the last POE meeting. Bill’s contributed his understanding, gleaned from years of experience of investigating buildings, of how the heating and ventilation in the Forum work in practice. He’s also put forward some new ideas and helped to refine some which had already been discussed by Informatics and E&B people, as summarised in the Informatics Energy report. Gratifyingly, the results of our in-house comfort survey have complemented the survey run by Bill.
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It’s been pointed out to me the items in the list of projects about sleep and computing were misleading for two reasons:
1. They implied that sleep wasn’t documented. In fact there is and has been documentation that has always been kept up to date with the sleep system.
2. The items implied that sleep needed fixing. In fact, the sleep system is working, and the main item on the list reperesents an enhancement to the system.
I’m very happy to set the record straight, and have corrected the list of projects accordingly.
I should also mention that, although I’ve not seen the energy consumption data, the current sleep system will have had a very considerable effect on energy consumption in the Appleton Tower labs, where users log out after using machines.