Evaluating the Effectiveness of Sustainable Strategies in Residential Interior Design
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.51173/ijaa.v2i1.63Keywords:
Sustainable Interior Design; Residential Environments; Environmental Performance; User Comfort; Emotional Well-Being; Biophilic Design.Abstract
The research assesses the efficacy of sustainable interior design strategies in residential environments, and specifically how it affects environmental performance and comfort of occupants. The study design was the exploration comparative case study, and the methodology was the descriptive-analytical approach to compare two residential units: the first one with the integrated sustainable design approach and the second with a traditional interior design approach. Performance-based, checklist-driven, evaluation tools, structured observations, and semi-structured interview were used to evaluate both essential environmental and user-centric indicators in data collection. The findings reveal that the sustainably constructed unit has continually achieved a better semi-quantitative performance score (1-3 scale) on various indicators of the environment such as natural and artificial lighting performance, ventilation effectiveness, thermal comfort stability, material sustainability, and biophilic integration. In parallel, user-based measures demonstrated high scores of visual comforts, perceived thermal comfort, emotional well-being, and general satisfaction in the case of sustainability compared to the traditional unit. These results incriminate a strong correspondence between the sustainable interior design strategies and the improvement of the environmental quality, and the improvement of the occupant experience. The research would be a contribution to the applied interior design and sustainability discourse as it provides an empirical and performance-based evaluation of residential interiors as a part of a real-life environment. However, the findings can be interpreted within the limits of the exploratory, case-based nature of the study and cannot be interpreted as applicable to the general population.
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