How the findings from the field experiment’s data set serve to answer the research questions has been outlined in the previous chapter. This final chapter discusses findings from (performing) the field experiment in a broader perspective. Section 8.1 describes five other take-aways from the field experiment itself, or the data set derived from it, that are related to the academic and practice fields this research seeks to contribute to. Section 8.2 elaborates on the field experiment’s validity, reliability, replicability, and generalizability, while section 8.3 concludes the chapter with three key suggestions for future research.
8.1
Research Contributions
As outlined in section 1.3, this research looks to add new knowledge to the academic fields of environmental psychology and lighting science about how the built environment, and light in particular, influences occupant behaviour. It also looks to showcase an exemplary design of how artificial lighting may become a tool for teachers to encourage certain behavioural change in their pupils, to provide specific design information for the architectural industry, and to contribute to the broader debate about improving the indoor quality of learning environments in general. the following five subsections outline how different findings and learnings from the field experiment contribute hereto.
8.1.1
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DISCUSSION
Artificial and Natural Light, a Joint Condition
In the four learning spaces hosting the field experiment, and commonly for most of today’s learning environments, natural light is present during curricular hours. Its manifestation in the learning space however depends on the time of day, weather conditions and window blind settings, and has been diligently studied both quantitively and qualitatively throughout the experiment. Without artificial lighting activated, it would be the only source of light and herewith fully define the occupant’s visual impression of their learning space. Though, the experiment in Frederiksbjerg school indicated that naturally lit learning spaces were only found to occur sporadically during curricular hours, and predominantly on sunny days. Most often artificial lighting was activated when the learning spaces hosting the experiment were in use. Regardless of the artificial lighting being the standard (A) setting or the experimental (B) settings (see Figure 8.1), in both situations natural light was found to only play a minor role in defining the occupant’s visual impression of the learning space with the artificial light dominating the visual scene. Hereto changing between light setting (A) and (B) was considered to have a profound visual effect to the occupants.
Discussion
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