building interfaces

Buildings typically are expected to provide their inhabitants with the opportunity to influence the indoor environment using various control devices. These include, for example, windows, luminaires, radiators, and shading elements. The quality and adequacy of the indoor environment is thus dependent on the availability and effectiveness of such devices. There is arguably a lack of generally agreed-upon evaluation procedures for this aspect of buildings' indoor environment, namely its controllability by building users, or – in the terminology of Human Ecology – its "ecological valency".