Empowering the Inhabitant: Communications Technologies, Responsive Interfaces, and Living in Sustainable Buildings
Empowering the Inhabitant: Communications Technologies, Responsive Interfaces, and Living in Sustainable Buildings
Given that the actions of building inhabitants can account for significant variations in building energy use and their overall impact on the environment, both buildings and their systems can be designed to anticipate and even transform behavior toward more sustainable patterns of living and building use. In the residential sector, differences in individual behavior can produce large variations in energy consumption. Social scientists recognize that motivations behind consumption or conservation of energy are societal and cultural and argue that achieving real and lasting energy reduction in the building sector requires deep social change in addition to changes in building technology and construction. This chapter looks at this and suggests how things can be changed.
Keywords: building energy use, residential sector, energy consumption, motivations, conservation of energy, building technologies
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