Less Automation More Information: A Learning Tool for a Post-occupancy Operation and Evaluation

Climate change and the pandemic generated an urgent need to have an effi-cient urban habitat that includes technological innovations to deal with the ecological and digital transitions. Italy counts about 14 million buildings, 12 of which are houses, responsible for more than 40% of final energy consumption, most of which is ascrib-able to users’ behavior and lifestyle. The increase in buildings’ energy performance is strongly related to a smart management of the demand and self-consumption, as well as a more effective and active involvement of the occupants: it is, therefore, pivotal to come up with user-friendly tools to measure and monitor the performance of the buildings and users’ habits. Tools to encourage the choices toward the environment’s comfort, rather than automation technologies, allowing the occupants and informa-tion systems to move in the direction of ecological transition. The aim is to create an aware “energy citizenship” for people living in efficient buildings. The proposal is a system that uses IoT technology and provides a global evaluation of the state of the house, from which can be extracted suggestions for better and virtuous behavior. The overall ecological footprint is measured based on five “cycles”: energy; environment; water; waste production; food. Collected data create an urban database that, along with big data, constitutes a set of boundary conditions that are crossed with single units’ data. The measures related to single units can be applied to a wider network in order to create a smart city, involving dwellers in a serious game on their homes’ performance. The proposal is part of the research on post-evaluation occupancy, in the belief that even the best model-houses perform worse in use, rather than the predictions expected on paper.