Veronica Garcia-Hansen

• B Arch PhD
• Professor (Associate) at Queensland University of Technology

This paper examines the feasibility of using vertical light pipes to naturally illuminate the central core of a multilevel building not reached by window light. The challenges addressed were finding a method to extract and distribute equal amounts of light at each level and designing collectors to improve the effectiveness of vertical light pipes i...

Discomfort glare is common problem in modern buildings that employ highly-glazed façades. Glare not only has negative impacts on occupant comfort but can also increase energy use in buildings. Yet a robust discomfort glare metric, particularly with regards to daylight, has proven elusive. The Unified Glare Probability (UGP), developed using 493 sur...

Lighting is an important component of indoor environmental quality that can affect occupant satisfaction, well-being and productivity. Lighting quality is a broad abstract concept and this has implications for its assessment. Subjective evaluations of lighting are an important complement to objective photometric information; however, there is limit...

In urbanized settlements, ensuring access to the outdoor environment is essential to stimulate well-being responses indoors. Windows provide access to aesthetic and natural features and bring in clues about the time, weather, and seasonal conditions outdoors. Although dynamic environmental attributes are inherent outdoor view qualities, no studies...

Background Intensive care medicine continues to improve, with advances in technology and care provision leading to improved patient survival. However, this has not been matched by similar advances in ICU bedspace design. Environmental factors including excessive noise, suboptimal lighting, and lack of natural lights and views can adversely impact s...

Background ICU survival is improving. However, many patients leave ICU with ongoing cognitive, physical, and/or psychological impairments and reduced quality of life. Many of the reasons for these ongoing problems are unmodifiable; however, some are linked with the ICU environment. Suboptimal lighting and excessive noise contribute to a loss of cir...

Despite natural light, near-façade structures' impact on Natural Ventilation (NV) performance, reducing cooling demand, is usually ignored by designers. This article aims to characterize interactions between balconies' design features (i.e. depth, unit level, and wind incident) and near-façade buildings on single-sided NV performance in a case stud...

Despite natural light, near-façade structures' impact on Natural Ventilation (NV) performance, reducing cooling demand, is usually ignored by designers. This article aims to characterise interactions between balconies' design features (i.e., depth, unit level, and wind incident) and near-façade buildings on single-sided NV performance in a case stu...

Double Skin Facades (DSF) integrated with shading devices are increasingly implemented in tall buildings to protect the building from excessive solar radiation. However, the potential overheating of DSF in warm climates leads to lower DSF performance in hot seasons. In this study, a new type of DSF named Interstitial Slat-blind DSF (IS-DSF) has bee...

This article presents and discusses the lessons learned from the monitoring of 25 integrated daylighting and electric lighting international case study projects. The case studies consist of real occupied buildings that have been monitored as part of the International Energy Agency (IEA) SHC Task 61 / EBC Annex 77 Programme. The general goal of the...

Background Young drivers are over-involved in sleepiness-related crashes. The alerting effects of bright light offer a potential countermeasure for driver sleepiness, either replacing or in conjunction with current countermeasures such as the use of caffeine. Methods Thirty young (18-25) chronically sleep-restricted drivers drove in a simulator un...

This report presents tools for post-occupancy evaluation (POE) to evaluate indoor lighting of commissioned projects (‘case studies’) under a common framework. In this report, POE includes technical environmental assessment (TEA) and observer-based environmental assessment (OBEA). The framework proposed in this report evaluates four key aspects of t...

Although daylight changes seen through windows are likely to mediate positive responses in occupants, there are no specialized instruments capturing responses to dynamic attributes in views. This study mapped self-report instruments that could be readily adjusted to measure subjective responses to dynamic views. Through a revision of the literature...

Hospitals are complex environments having to balance out contradictory requirements from patients and health workers. Despite evidence demonstrating the critical role of the hospital’s luminous environment in responding to occupants’ requirements and needs, and the importance of engaging with the patient experience to improve the quality of patient...

This paper presents an alternative workflow for thermal comfort prediction. By using the leverage of Data Science & AI in combination with the power of computational design, the proposed methodology exploits the extensive comfort data provided by the ASHRAE Global Thermal Comfort Database II to generate more customised comfort prediction models. Th...

Complex fenestration systems (CFS) have proven to enhance the daylight quality inside spaces when designed correctly. While research in this area focuses on assessing CFS performance accurately, the number of CFS daylight analysis frameworks are too complex for the building designer to use for selecting a suitable CFS. Also, some CFS design framewo...

Insufficient airflow in the cavity of Double Skin façade (DSF) systems has resulted in the overheating risk of the cavity and the resulting reduction in thermal performance in cooling dominant climates. Previous research has focused more on buoyancy-driven natural ventilation, and there is a lack of research on utilising wind-driven ventilation in...

Complex fenestration systems (CFS) are effective daylighting strategies that improve daylight performance in indoor living spaces. Nevertheless, the design of CFS is complex as it requires specialised knowledge in optical physics and advanced building simulation. This paper presents an evaluation method (CFStrace) to optimise the CFS design in a mu...

Outdoor views are critical for sustaining well-being in urbanized environments, as they increase opportunities for contact with natural and dynamic features. Yet, current view assessment procedures do not investigate the role of dynamic attributes in views. In this study, we examined a systematic procedure to test the adequacy of representing dynam...

This case study explores how architecture students can learn to design media architecture within virtual design environments tools. The target participants of this study are advanced (i.e. 3rd year) architecture students at the University of Applied Science, Bochum, Germany. To evaluate the student-experience, students were asked to develop a media...

When entering and exiting tunnels, high luminance variations may cause severe crashes due to the occurrence of glare and the blackout effect. In this study, we propose a methodology that will effectively minimise the exaggerated light variations that arise over a short distance at the tunnel endpoints. An underpass which has the same characteristic...

Accurate glare prediction is a challenging task due to its subjective nature, as occupants' sensitivity to visual discomfort may differ under the same conditions depending on the individual. Although several glare metrics have been developed, limitations still exist. In this study, a new framework was proposed for developing new discomfort glare pr...

Introduction Young drivers are over-involved in sleepiness-related crashes. Daytime and nighttime exposure to light might shift the human circadian phase and alertness. The alerting effects of bright light were compared with those of caffeine in young drivers. Methods In a within-subjects study, 30 chronically sleep-deprived non-professional drive...

Exposure to environmental changes in windows are essential to sustain healthy conditions indoors; however, there are no procedures for capturing these variations dynamically. In this study, we provide the foundations for building a framework aimed at understanding the effects of luminous variability in window views. First, we labelled a sample of v...

Balconies could enhance natural ventilation (NV) and reduce reliance on mechanical ventilation in cooling dominant climates. Indoor environment and thermal comfort under NV mode are usually less predictable than Mechanical Ventilation (MV), and balcony geometry's impacts on these parameters have not yet been classified. This study aims to investiga...

Heating Ventilation and Air Conditioning (HVAC), including, Mechanical ventilation (MV) in the building sector accounts for around 40% of electricity consumption and a large percentage of Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emissions. Natural ventilation (NV), as an alternative method, assist in decreasing energy consumption as well as harmful emissions. Balconie...

Balconies could enhance natural ventilation (NV) and reduce reliance on mechanical ventilation in cooling dominant climates. Indoor environment and thermal comfort under NV mode are usually less predictable than Mechanical Ventilation (MV), and balcony geometry's impacts on these parameters have not yet been classified. This study aims to investiga...

Although in the last decade many indices and metrics have been developed to predict glare in the built environment, there is a lack of consensus-based glare metrics that could measure the level of visual discomfort indicated by people in their actual working environment. We present a new approach which integrates the use of Machine Learning algorit...

The ready availability and widespread deployment of IoT devices and sensors enable a high granularity of quantitative data to be collected to give a real-time appraisal of a building’s environmental performance. Rating and assessment frameworks are increasingly taking advantage of insights that can be derived from both new building technology and b...

High Dynamic Range (HDR) imaging using a fisheye lens has provided new opportunities to evaluate the luminous environment in visual comfort research. For glare analysis, strict calibration is necessary to extract accurate luminous maps to achieve reliable glare results. Most studies have focused on correcting the vignetting effect in HDR imaging du...

Predicting discomfort glare in open-plan offices is a challenging problem. Although glare research has existed for more than 50 years, all current glare metrics have accuracy limitations, especially in open-plan offices with low lighting levels. Thus, it is crucial to develop a new method to predict glare more accurately. This paper is the first to...

Complex fenestration systems (CFS) are becoming a part of the building designer's daylight strategies to bring higher quality of daylighting. While numerous tools effectively analyse the behaviour of CFS in the building space, the field lacks a comprehensive CFS design tool that takes the built context and environmental conditions into consideratio...

Occupant behaviour (OB) models relating to daylighting and blind use have been developed for cellular office configurations. However, this is not the case for large open plan offices that represent different spatial, daylighting and occupancy characteristics. This paper presents a methodology to simulate annual blind use based on the daylight avail...

With the continuous rise of global urbanization, city planners and policymakers are increasingly concerned with urban heat islands (UHI), which are metropolitan areas that are significantly warmer than their surrounding rural areas. We address the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goal 11 “Sustainable Cities and Communities,” and we design an...

Novel lighting strategies have the potential to create luminous environments that are more satisfactory to building occupants and reduce occupants’ interventions in lighting conditions. Testing innovative design systems in the immersive virtual reality (IVR) environment could be a useful approach to investigate these systems quickly and easily. Thi...

As changes to building design increase the presence of daylight in the office environment, there is an increased need to account for and manage resulting potential visual discomfort. The efficient and accurate prediction of glare is an ongoing process, and the applicability of thresholds for the classification of glare in field settings is still be...

Natural ventilation can provide building occupants with thermal comfort and a healthy indoor environment. Among all the design related parameters that affect ventilation performance, ventilation mode (i.e. single-sided and cross ventilation) is perhaps the main one. The current study uses full-scale in-situ measurements to investigate the effect of...

Young drivers (18–24 years) are over-represented in sleep-related crashes (comprising one in five fatal crashes in developed countries) primarily due to decreased sleep opportunity, lower tolerance for sleep loss, and ongoing maturation of brain areas associated with driving-related decision making. Impaired driving performance is the proximal reas...

Methodological elements of papers considered for quality rating. (DOCX)

Quality of individual papers and body of evidence based on the GRADE criteria. A single GRADE score for a given outcome within an individual paper and an Overall Grade Score (OGS) for the body of evidence for that outcome are presented in the last two columns of this table. The upgrading and downgrading elements have been highlighted in yellow. The...

A high luminance contrast between windows and surrounding surfaces can increase the risk of discomfort glare, which can diminish office workers' satisfaction and productivity. Accordingly, it can lead to occupant interventions, such as drawing window blinds or increasing electric light levels, which are intended to enhance indoor visual comfort but...

Occupants' visual comfort is an important consideration in sustainable building design. To help create visually comfortable environments, building designers need an easy-to-use method to predict visual discomfort through simulations. This paper aims to present a proof-of-concept predictive method that analyses the contrast ratios of multi-region lu...

Natural ventilation and balconies are two of the most desirable features of a living space in subtropical climates. The aim of this paper is to investigate the effect of balconies on natural ventilation performance and thermal comfort of residential buildings. To this end, in-situ full-scale measurements were carried out for Computational Fluid Dyn...

Energy demand in cooling-dominant climates can be reduced by implementation of natural ventilation as a passive cooling strategy. Accordingly, suitable evaluation and prediction tools are requirements for effectively introducing natural ventilation in building design. In addition, the rapid emergence of multi-storey buildings can accelerate energy...

For the design of naturally ventilated buildings, information of air speed at the openings of a building is important. However, the only data set usually available to designers is meteorological data, such as wind speed and direction measured at weather stations. This paper explores the ratio of air speed at building openings to the wind speed meas...

Natural ventilation can be used as a low-cost alternative to mechanical ventilation. Bearing in mind that ventilation mode plays an important role in natural ventilation performance, the current study investigates the effectiveness of two major natural ventilation modes (i.e. single-sided and cross ventilation) in providing thermal comfort for occu...

The physiological and psychological benefits of daylighting for office occupants have been well explored. Current research usually focuses on visual comfort in office buildings. However, there is limited knowledge about daylight quality in industrial work environments. In Australia, most industrial buildings are built from standard factory structur...

High luminance contrast between windows and surrounding surfaces could cause discomfort glare, which could reduce office workers’ productivity. It might also increase energy usage of buildings due to occupants’ interventions in lighting conditions to improve indoor visual quality. It is presumed that increasing the luminance of the areas surroundin...

Balconies, as one of the main architectural features in subtropical climates, are assumed to enhance the ventilation performance of buildings by redirecting the wind. Although there are some studies on the effect of balconies on natural ventilation inside buildings, the majority have been conducted on single zone buildings with simple geometries. T...

High contrast ratios between windows and surrounding surfaces could cause reduced visibility or discomfort for occupants. Consequently, building users may choose to intervene in lighting conditions through closing blinds and turning on the lamps in order to enhance indoor visual comfort. Such interventions increase projected electric lighting use i...

A high contrast ratio between windows and surrounding walls may lead to office workers visual discomfort that could negatively affect their satisfaction and productivity. Consequently, occupants may try to adapt their working environment by closing blinds and/ or turning on the lights to enhance indoor visual comfort, which can reduce predicted ene...

Vertical windows are the most common and simplest method to introduce daylight to interior spaces of office buildings, while also providing a view and connection to the outside. However, high contrast ratios between windows and surrounding surfaces can cause visual discomfort for occupants and can negatively influence their health and productivity....

Complex behaviour of air flow in the buildings makes it difficult to predict. Consequently, architects use common strategies for designing buildings with adequate natural ventilation. However, each climate needs specific strategies and there are not many heuris-tics for subtropical climate in literature. Furthermore, most of these common strategies...

Daylight devices are important components of any climate responsive façade system. But, the evolution of parametric CAD sys-tems and digital fabrication has had an impact on architectural form so that regular forms are shifting to complex geometries. Architectural and engineering integration of daylight devices in envelopes with complex geometries...

Good daylighting design in buildings not only provides a comfortable luminous environment, but also delivers energy savings and comfortable and healthy environments for building occupants. Yet, there is still no consensus on how to assess what constitutes good daylighting design. Currently amongst building performance guidelines, Daylighting factor...

his paper looks at the accuracy of using the built-in camera of smart phones and free software as an economical way to quantify and analyse light exposure by producing luminance maps from High Dynamic Range (HDR) images. HDR images were captured with an Apple iPhone 4S to capture a wide variation of luminance within an indoor and outdoor scene. The...

Traditional shading design principles guide the vertical and horizontal orientation of fins, louvres and awnings being applied to orthogonal planar façades. Due to doubly curved envelopes characterising many contemporary designs, these rules of thumb are now not always applicable. Operable blinds attempt to regulate the fluctuating luminance of day...

During an intensive design-led workshop multidisciplinary design teams examined options for a sustainable multi-residential tower on an inner urban site in Brisbane (Australia). The main aim was to demonstrate the key principles of daylight to every habitable room and cross-ventilation to every apartment in the subtropical climate while responding...

A new decision-making tool that will assist designers in the selection of appropriate daylighting solutions for buildings in tropical locations has been previously proposed by the authors. Through an evaluation matrix that prioritizes the parameters that best respond to the needs of tropical climates (e.g. reducing solar gain and protection from gl...

High Dynamic Range (HDR) imaging was used to collect luminance information at workstations in 2 open-plan office buildings in Queensland, Australia: one lit by skylights, vertical windows and electric light, and another by skylights and electric light. This paper compares illuminance and luminance data collected in these offices with occupant feedb...

Light Transport Systems (LTS) (e.g light pipes, fibre optics) can illuminate core areas within buildings with great potential for energy savings. However, they do not provide a clear connection to the outside like windows do, and their effects on people's physiological and psychological health are not well understood. Furthermore, how people percei...

This paper assesses and compares the performances of two daylight collection strategies, one passive and one active, for large-scale mirrored light pipes (MLP) illuminating deep plan buildings. Both strategies use laser cut panels (LCP) as the main component of the collection system. The passive system comprises LCPs in pyramid form, whereas the ac...

This paper discusses two different approaches to teaching design and their modes of delivery and reflects upon their successes and failures. Two small groups of third year design students have been given projects focussing on incorporation of daylighting to architectural design in studios having different design themes. In association with the curr...

The use of natural light is very beneficial in office buildings because energy consumption can be reduced, and working conditions can be enhanced, which positively affect workers' health and productivity. However, bringing natural light into deep plan office buildings is not possible with simple windows or skylights, and light transport systems are...

The issue of whether improved building services such as air quality, provision of daylight, thermal comfort etc, have a positive impact on the health and productivity of building occupants is still an open question. There is significant anecdotal evidence supporting the notion that health and productivity of building occupants can be improved by im...

Abstract – Deep plans are a common practice in middle and high-rise office building design, and large open plans have become the preferred office layout by modern businesses due to the flexibility of the space and economic benefits achieved from maximum plot to gross floor area ratios. Consequently, the deep core areas of these buildings cannot be...

Spaces without northerly orientations have an impact on the ‘energy behaviour’ of a building. This paper outlines possible energy savings and better performance achieved by different zenithal solar passive strategies (skylights, roof monitors and clerestory roof windows) and element arrangements across the roof in zones of cold to temperate climate...

The case study examines development work on the application of light pipe technology for a new bioclimatic high rise building in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. The paper outlines the architectural and environmental issues associated with the design of this building. It presents theoretical modelling and simulation work done to test the feasibility of usin...