Text mining for occupant perspectives on the physical workplace
An analysis is presented of occupants' responses from a commercial building indoor environment satisfaction survey database. Building from satisfaction ratings and standardized categorical responses collected in surveys for 192 office buildings in the United States, text analysis software is used to analyse text responses to open-ended survey questions, focusing on occupants' perspectives on the workplace and building overall, temperature, and acoustics. These occupant texts detail interactions between occupants and their physical environment in a technical sense, but also interpret these interactions, assess their consequences, and reflect on social relationships and other matters that lie outside dimension-by-dimension assessments of the physical environment. Viewed together these texts reveal a user-centred perspective that points to issues that rest below the surface of more technical analyses of buildings, such as over air-conditioning, worker stress and frustration, workplace usability, and relation...