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Since occupant behaviour impacts the energy performance of buildings, its study is relevant in order to bridge the performance gap. While the factors influencing occupant behaviour have been established, most studies have focused on those factors that motivate the action, such as environmental and temporal conditions. Contextual factors including spatial and occupant characteristics, which act as action moderators, remain a subject to explore. In this way, this article aims to identify patterns in the occupants' actions in office environments, based on spatial and human factors.A field study, including 514 occupants in 85 office spaces, was carried out in 11 buildings in Concepción, Chile. The results indicate that spatial layout is significantly related to the operation of windows, blinds, and thermostats, but not personal devices. Gender did not influence whether an occupant was active or not and age range was only significant regarding blinds. In shared spaces, there were fewer active occupants and whose acts depend on the perception of opportunity that they have, which is associated with element control distance and occupant age. The findings suggest that the probability that actions occur varies based on spatial and human factors, particularly because these factors affect occupant perception of opportunity.

Chile is a resilient country which has been struck by a series of natural disasters, affecting heritage areas whose inhabitants live under a great economic and energy vulnerability. Although there are some advances that have been made in the country to recover its heritage, these do not include energy efficiency parameters. In this context, intervention in heritage properties requires a specific, complementary treatment above and beyond what is currently applied. Consequently, this research aims to develop a methodology that balances heritage and energy in energy vulnerability contexts. The proposed methodology analyzes heritage and energy aspects separately through attribute matrices, as well as the building pathologies, to later integrate the results in a final matrix which allows defining an energy-heritage intervention plan. In this way, it includes the systematic identification of elements that require intervention because of pathological issues, as well as the type of intervention that would be acceptable given its heritage significance and whether they mean a possibility to optimize the energy performance. The methodology, for its validation, was applied in a heritage residential building inhabited by low-income occupants. The case study presents physical damages and is located in the city of Lota, an area with an outstanding cultural heritage from the mining era.

Thermal discomfort is one of the main triggers for occupants’ interactions with components of the built environment such as adjustments of thermostats and/or opening windows and strongly related to the energy use in buildings. Understanding causes for thermal (dis-)comfort is crucial for design and operation of any type of building. The assessment of human thermal perception through rating scales, for example in post-occupancy studies, has been applied for several decades; however, long-existing assumptions related to these rating scales had been questioned by several researchers. The aim of this study was to gain deeper knowledge on contextual influences on the interpretation of thermal perception scales and their verbal anchors by survey participants. A questionnaire was designed and consequently applied in 21 language versions. These surveys were conducted in 57 cities in 30 countries resulting in a dataset containing responses from 8225 participants. The database offers potential for further analysis in the areas of building design and operation, psycho-physical relationships between human perception and the built environment, and linguistic analyses.

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