Office Design Decisions and Indoor Environmental Quality: A Parametric Design and Simulation-Based Workflow

People spend about 90% of their time indoors. Thus, seeking design strategies to address the challenge of indoor environmental quality (IEQ) at the design stage is crucial. However, few simulation studies have considered the mutual effect of all four components of IEQ. This paper aims to introduce a simulation-based framework involving parametric modeling to simultaneously quantify the impact of office design decisions on all four domains of IEQ namely, thermal comfort, visual comfort, acoustic comfort, and air quality. To achieve this goal, it first develops a set of metrics to quantify four IEQ domains. Then, the design parameters which impact any IEQ criteria in the design stage including room geometry, façade design, and material properties are provided. Finally, a case study is considered and investigated to demonstrate the proposed workflow and provide a set of near-optimal design parameters that yield desirable performance according to the indoor comfort metrics.