This study was stipulated by today’s limited living conditions of middle income households in Bangladesh who have economic constraints that contribute to hindering improvement of their existing domestic settings that may affect occupants’ mental health and wellbeing. The design of domestic living environments tend to influence occupants’ emotions, feelings and moods. Thus, domestic environmental experiences need to be examined and incorporated into architectural design decisions. To understand the notion of such experiences, this study reviewed literatures concerning the related domains extensively. This study found the significant impact of domestic environments on human perceptions. Each design of domestic settings affects occupants’ emotional responses positively or negatively. Through this study, the term domestic environmental experience was defined as users’ experiences of cognitive perceptions and physical responses to their domestic built environment. In addition, it led to proposing the composition of domestic environmental experiences that need to be correlated with architectural design solutions. Nonetheless, this study did not examine the correlation where the emerging notion of Environmental Experience Design (EXD) may serve as the mediator. Accordingly, this new horizon of EXD research needs to be explored further with the aim to improve domestic built environments in Bangladesh which were the original driver of this research.

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Global increases in the demand for energy are imposing strong pressures over the environment while compromising the capacity of emerging economies to achieve sustainable development. In this context, implementation of effective strategies to reduce consumption in residential buildings has become a priority concern for policy makers as minor changes at the household scale can result in major energy savings. This study aims to contribute to ongoing research on energy consumer profiling by exploring the forecasting capabilities of discrete socio-economic factors that are accessible through social housing allocation systems. Accordingly, survey data gathered by the Chilean Ministry of Social Development was used identify key characteristics that may predict firewood usage for space heating purposes among potential beneficiaries of the Chilean social housing program. The analyzed data evidences strong correlations between general household characteristics and space heating behavior in certain climatic zones, suggesting that personalized delivery of energy efficiency measures can potentially increase the effectiveness of initiatives aimed towards the reduction of current patterns of consumption.

Humans relate to the living environment physically and psychologically. Environmental psychology has a rich developed history while experience design emerged recently in the industrial design domain. Nonetheless, these approaches have barely been merged, understood or implemented in architectural design practices. This study explored the correlation between experience design and environmental psychology. Moreover, it conducted literature reviews on theories about emotion, user experience design, experience design and environmental psychology, followed by the analyses of spatial settings and environmental quality data of a selected aged care facility in Victoria, Australia, as a case study. Accordingly, this study led to proposing a research framework on environmental experience design (EXD). It can be defined as a deliberate attempt that affiliates experience design and environmental psychology with creation of the built environment that should accommodate user needs and demands. The EXD research framework proposed in this study was tailored for transforming related design functions into the solutions that contribute to improving the built environment for user health and wellbeing.