Constructing Green:  The Social Structures of Sustainability, edited by Rebecca Henn and Andrew Hoffman, has just been released by MIT Press,  2013.  It features a chapter  by  K. Velikov, L. Bartram and others on “Empowering the Inhabitant: Communication Technologies, Responsive Interfaces, and Living in Sustainable Buildings”.   The chapter discusses the importance of the occupant factor in the design of better building performance and suggests design considerations for encouraging conservation as part of the architectural and engineering dialogue.

Given that the actions of building inhabitants can account for significant variations in building energy use, we believe that buildings and their systems can be designed to anticipate and even transform behavior of building inhabitants toward more sustainable patterns of living and building use habits.