Dorsa Fatourehchi
Doctor of Philosophy candidate
Architecture, Construction
Biography
Dorsa is a PhD candidate at the Melbourne School of Design researching the intersection of human, building and environment, focusing on human-building interaction to explore the building occupants’ comfort while decreasing building energy use. Her research interest includes the examination of thermal comfort, energy efficiency and environmentally sustainable design (ESD). With expertise in occupant-centric control and energy-related human behaviour, she is deeply committed to creating buildings that prioritise the health and comfort of their occupants while minimising their energy use.
She has been awarded a prestigious Melbourne research scholarship, which has allowed her to pursue her passion for creating sustainable, healthy, and comfortable buildings. As she continues to explore this field, she looks forward to leveraging her expertise and knowledge to help shape the future of architecture and building design.
She is experienced in indoor environmental quality (IEQ) and emphasises the importance of creating spaces that promote health and well-being. She has also developed a thorough understanding of sustainability rating systems and has honed her skills in multi-criteria decision-making approaches. She is familiar with machine learning algorithms and their application to the field of architecture, particularly in the realm of building energy efficiency. In addition, she is experienced in energy simulation methods, which enables her to predict and optimise a building's energy use and thermal performance to ensure that buildings are designed to operate efficiently without sacrificing the comfort and well-being of their occupants.
Thesis
Human-Building Interaction Model for Energy Use of University Student Accommodation in Melbourne
In the Australian context, although high-performance homes are well understood, further research is required to explore occupants’ interactions with building systems and the way in which the energy and thermal performance of the buildings could be affected. The heavy reliance of buildings on mechanical systems can negatively affect occupants’ expectations, lowering their tolerance against thermal-visual-acoustic discomfort, which can result in higher interactions of occupants with building systems. Also, inflexibility in design could result in limitations based on which occupant’s choices to achieve comfort can be influenced. This necessitates a further understanding of the occupants’ interaction mechanism with their built environment to offer a broad range of adaptive opportunities for occupants in future to achieve comfort or eliminate discomfort while providing insights into energy-saving and energy-wasting behaviours.
In 2017, the Victorian DEWLP published the Better Apartment Design Standards to be implemented in the Victoria Planning schemes due to growing criticism over the quality of newly constructed apartments in Melbourne. In terms of student accommodations as one type of residential apartment, despite the residential standards developed by the local government and industry-led accreditation systems, there is a necessity for design standards developments for purpose-built student accommodation (PBSA). Although student accommodation is an important facility that plays a crucial role in students’ living and learning activities, research is still lacking regarding the design effects of student accommodations, especially on energy performance and students’ thermal-visual-acoustic discomfort.
This research aims to propose a ‘Human-building Interaction’ model based on which the occupants' energy-saving and energy-wasting behaviour owing to their available building components as adaptive opportunities can be understood. Therefore, to ensure the model’s applicability in identifying occupants' comfort and discomfort-based energy use, research is required to understand the relationship between buildings’ indoor environmental affordance and students’ daily interaction with buildings to achieve or prevent their thermal-visual-acoustic- related comfort and discomfort, respectively. Furthermore, this model can contribute to the body of knowledge by including human and building-related aspects in identifying occupants' energy use (energy-saving and energy-wasting behaviour) in their accommodation.