A computer game to help people understand the energy performance of buildings

Building users play an important role in determining the energy use of a specific building. Indeed, their behaviour could be one of the reasons behind the energy ‘performance gap’ observed in many buildings. Moreover, informed building users can promote the sustainability agenda through their consumer choices. This, however, raises the issue of understanding the energy performance of buildings. This paper presents an exercise on developing and testing a computer game which introduces players to the basic concepts of building energy performance. A software application was developed to visualise post-occupancy evaluation data in a dynamic three-dimensional context. A pilot study was used for assessing and fine-tuning the methodology, followed by the main study of two workshops with two different user groups: non-experts and entry-level specialists. The results are presented using both quantitative and qualitative approaches. The findings suggest that the advantages and challenges of ‘gamification’ described in the literature are generally confirmed by the tentative evidence of this exercise. In addition, the process highlights the potential of novel ways of presenting building data in enabling more stakeholders to engage with the issue of building energy performance.