Indoor Environmental Quality

Intent

The goal of the guidelines in this section is to provide exemplary indoor air quality and other interior environmental conditions to promote occupant health, wellbeing, and productivity. Here, health is more than the absence of disease, and wellbeing includes provision of physical comfort and psychological satisfaction with the physical work environment.

Overview

The provision of indoor environmental quality at levels that support productive human habitation both complements and supports the environmental and economic goals for sustainable building. Appropriate indoor environmental qualities of air, temperature, sound, light, and visible and physical space, and occupants’ ability to personally control these are the building’s contributions to the biological bases of occupant comfort, health, and wellbeing. Harmful effects on occupants of poor indoor environmental quality are well documented in laboratory and field studies. Similarly, enhanced indoor environmental quality helps occupants feel and perform at their best, with subsequent health, wellbeing, and productivity benefits for themselves and their work organizations. These indoor environmental quality guidelines are constructed to first and foremost help prevent harm coming to occupants, then to optimize environmental quality conditions to correspond with human physiological processes, and finally to fine tune environmental conditions to work activities in a way that further enhances personal and organizational productivity.

Objectives

• Provide a clean building that will minimize pollutant sources in the structure and its occupants.
• Provide a dry building to minimize structural and health problems associated with water intrusion and accumulation.
• Provide a well-ventilated building to dilute pollutants and bioeffluents emitted by the building materials, the occupants and their activities.
• Provide for occupant thermal comfort.
• Provide daylight for general ambient illumination.
• Provide interior view space or views to the exterior.
• Provide lighting solutions of high quality for visual tasks and preferred interior rendering.
• Provide interior conditions that avoid harmful vibration and noise effects and produce a positive acoustic environment acceptable to occupants and appropriate to their tasks.
• Provide for local occupant control of localized indoor environmental conditions in order to quickly correct harmful conditions and to better support work performance.
• Provide an interior spatial arrangement that encourages healthy human interaction and movement

General Indoor Environmental Quality Information

The following information is collected in the Indoor Environmental Quality section of the B3 Guidelines Tracking Tool, under section P.0:

Final Design:

• Indoor environmental quality strategies used, including narrative

Closeout:

• Updated Indoor environmental quality strategies used, including narrative

Appendices

Appendix I-8: Daylighting Factor Calculator