Concluding remarks and future outlook

This book has defined relevant terms in the field of building occupant research and provided a comprehensive overview of the steps required to study occupants’ behavior in buildings, whether in situ or through laboratory experiments or surveys. It has offered both broad and specific guidance about research design and methodological approaches, including data collection, storage, and processing, and presented relevant discussions of ground truth and ethics. At the time of this book’s publication, the field of occupant research is relatively new, but with rapidly increasing activity. Therefore, the motivation was to significantly improve the state of the art of occupant behavior research methodologies, considering the multidisciplinarity of the field by including authors from the broad backgrounds of engineering, architecture, interior design, information technology, and social sciences. Readers of this book will realize that the field of occupant behavior research still holds a large number of unanswered fundamental questions to be tackled. Thus, this concluding chapter provides the editors’ perspectives on research needs future outlook for the field of occupant behavior.