Wellbeing and our buildings

This Issue This is a part of the Healthy homes feature

By - , Build 181

Wellbeing is now a key government policy, but what does this mean for the construction industry? BRANZ research suggests a mobile app to collect enduser satisfaction levels could be a new measure of building performance.

WHILE WELLBEING is referenced within different forms of legislation relevant to the built environment, there is uncertainty about what the term means in this context.

BRANZ obtained Building Research Levy funding to scope the topic and to gauge whether the government’s strategic focus on wellbeing has practical implications for the future of building and construction.

The research identified a need for building performance measures that encompass an end-user perspective. Due to developments in digital technology, it also identified an opportunity to achieve this through the development and use of a mobile application.

Wellbeing mentioned in legislation

The concept of wellbeing has had a long association with notions of building quality.

This is detailed within section 3a(ii) of the Building Act 2004, which aims to provide for regulation and performance standards that ensure ‘buildings have attributes that contribute appropriately to the health, physical independence, and well-being of the people who use them’.

Wellbeing is also specifically provided for in section 5(2) of the Resource Management Act 1991 (RMA). This refers to the sustainable management of natural and physical resources in a way or at a rate that enables people and communities to provide for their social, economic and cultural wellbeing (among other factors).

This is emphasised in the current resource management review, which seeks to repeal the Resource Management Act, replacing it with the Natural and Built Environments Act (NBEA) and Strategic Planning Act.

The focus of the NBEA would be on enhancing the quality of the environment and on achieving positive outcomes to support the wellbeing of present and future generations. This provides clear direction for our planning system in terms of ensuring that design and development outcomes, both in the short and long term, support wellbeing.

Government pushes wellbeing outcomes

Wellbeing has further emerged as a defining element in recent government initiatives such as the Wellbeing Budget 2019 (and its underpinning in the Treasury’s Living Standards Framework). This moves beyond a solely economic focus on measuring prosperity to allocating government spending according to wellbeing priorities.

Local government also has a strong mandate for progressing wellbeing outcomes through the Local Government (Community Well-being) Amendment Act 2019, while the Construction Sector Accord has set the creation of ‘safe, healthy and durable homes, buildings and infrastructure that support the wellbeing of our communities’ as a key outcome.

The emergence of wellbeing as a key policy objective and the recognition of housing and environmental quality as instrumental to wellbeing signals the increasing importance given to the built environment to improve the living standards of all New Zealanders.

Specific outputs and outcomes unclear

Far from being a simple buzzword, wellbeing has been clearly framed as an intrinsic objective of building and construction. This turns the technicalised nature of our industry on its head by showing that, at its heart, building and construction have purely human purposes.

Nevertheless, it remains unclear how the term ‘wellbeing’ might translate into outputs for the building and construction industry and outcomes for building inhabitants. This is not prescribed within the Construction Sector Accord or relevant legislation. Accordingly, it is understandable if the concept of wellbeing elicits confusion within the industry.

Applying systems thinking

BRANZ’s refreshed strategy places our organisation in a unique position to address this issue. Our adoption of systems thinking prompts BRANZ to look beyond the traditional bounds of building science to consider the impact that the built environment has on people.

This challenges BRANZ to be reflexive in the application of its strategic vision and to be clearer about the better outcomes it hopes the industry will achieve. During the scoping exercise, it became apparent this can be accomplished by BRANZ being clear about the outcomes important to end users.

The need for building performance metrics that capture end users’ perspectives is outlined in BRANZ research literature on construction sector performance.

This indicates that one of the current issues with sector performance measurement is that industry tends to use key performance indicators that measure buildings’ functional performance – such as light and air quality. Quality of life impacts for building occupants are seldom measured.

Measure experience, not just function

This suggests there is a lack of customer focus (the customer being the building inhabitant or the community) in the construction sector in measuring industry performance and an overemphasis on technicalised, quantitative performance measures.

Focusing on end-user experience of the built environment requires a different approach from the quantitative methods of analysis traditionally employed in building science. This is because wellbeing is a state of subjective human experience rather than an empirically quantifiable fact.

Accordingly, understanding how strategic wellbeing objectives could translate into enduser outcomes requires integrating qualitative methodologies – for example, interviews with building occupants – with more traditional building science. This is so the causal relationship between the built environment and a subjective sense of wellbeing becomes clear.

Limited post-occupancy evaluations

Industry already has a method for assessing how buildings affect end users – post-occupancy evaluation (POE). Traditionally undertaken by architects, POE is the systematic collection of information from building occupants regarding elements of building performance through surveys and interviews.

These form part of a feedback cycle where learnings can inform the design of future buildings. POE is therefore outcomes focused and informs future decisions about the built environment via understanding and documenting user experience.

However, as interviews and surveys can be time-consuming, POEs are no longer widely undertaken.

Digital technology presents opportunity

Developments in digital technology present an opportunity to change this and to efficiently collate subjective end-user wellbeing data on a mass scale.

As trialled in Australia and the US, digital POEs completed via a mobile app have the potential to reach a large number of people to obtain end-user perspectives on building performance.

By digitally collating a broad range of qualitative performance data to complement more traditional quantitative performance assessment methods, a data source of this kind can give insight into how different aspects of the built environment impact wellbeing.

In turn, this presents an opportunity to compile a deeper understanding of the causal relationship between the built environment and wellbeing in a way that could inform the future planning, design and construction of buildings.

BRANZ recognises the potential of using digital technology to collate data on the wellbeing impacts of the built environment. This has resulted in the allocation of Building Research Levy funding for research and development starting in April 2021.

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