Exploring the Essence of User Perspective in Studying Sustainability Aspects of Secondary Educational Buildings

Over the past few years, practitioners and researchers have worked together to establish frameworks that look into and evaluate the sustainability aspects of buildings using different measures and practices. Hence, this research paper introduces a three-tier framework for user perspective assessment in educational buildings. The first tier involves identification of the users’ perspective attributes that have a direct influence on the users’ perspective in existing buildings. These assessment attributes cover most of the users’ perspective areas in existing buildings. In addition, they are shown to be more comprehensive and to cover more areas compared against sustainability rating systems. The second tier is the weighting process of main factors stepping on the implementation of fuzzy analytical network process technique. The third tier is a fuzzy expert system that is to determine the overall user perspective index based on merging the weights of factors alongside their scores. The E.V. building in Concordia University was assessed to determine the impact of weighting and local context on the user perspective assessment.