Housing Performance, Feedback and Learning

Speaker:Professor Fionn Stevenson, Professor of Sustainable Design, University of Sheffield

Homes in the UK routinely uses twice as much energy as predicted, creating a major ‘performance gap’.  Astonishingly, there is still no formal requirement to apply evidence-based feedback from building occupancy to the design process, in either architectural education or practice, in order to understand the reasons behind poor performance. Why is this? This talk argues for a tiered and expanded mixed methods approach to post-occupancy evaluation (POE), as described in the speaker’s monograph “Housing fit for purpose: performance, feedback and learning” (Stevenson, 2019). A major retrofit housing project is then analysed to reveal many factors that condition energy use.

Fionn Stevenson holds a Chair in Sustainable Design at the University of Sheffield School of Architecture and is Campaigns Director for the Building Performance Network. Her research and consultancy work focuses on developing innovative methods of building performance evaluation in relation to occupancy feedback and social learning in order to improve building design. She is particularly interested in the control interfaces between buildings and people from a holistic perspective which includes resource use in its widest dimension. Her focus is on housing. She advises various government bodies and NGOs and has over 120 publications to date.  

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This seminar is a part of the Martin Centre Research Seminar Series.