Comprehensive Annual Daylight Design through a Goal-Based Approach

Decisions affecting building form and orientation and choices regarding opening size, type and positioning have a great effect on the building’s access to daylight and are typically made during the earliest stages of architectural design. Computer simulations of daylight performance have become a powerful tool for making design decisions, especially since the diurnal and seasonal changes in daylight necessitate an annual, climate inclusive performance analysis because of the strong influence of climate conditions on daylight accessibility. However, the amount and complexity of information generated by an annual analysis can be overwhelming, so a need exists for appropriate, user-friendly methods to process and communicate these data to the designer. To address this problem, an alternative approach to traditional daylight analysis is explored here to develop appropriate goal-based metrics and annual graphic display formats which present illuminance, glare and solar heat gain data with a focus on time variations. Graphic outputs are created using the temporal map format to improve understanding of daylight performance as it varies over the year, and to enable comparisons to be made between spatial and non-spatial quantities. In particular, a consistent and intuitive triangular colour scale is proposed to express goal compliance, so as to enhance further comparability between dissimilar quantities and thereby assist with critical choices and performance tradeoffs during the design process.