Impact of furniture layout on indoor daylighting performance in existing residential buildings in Malaysia

Abstract

Currently, home-based computing workspaces have developed substantially all over the world, especially in Malaysia. This growing trend attracts computer workers to run a business from their residential units. Hence, visual comfort needs to be considered in addition to thermal comfort for home workers in their residential working rooms. While such rooms are always occupied with furniture, the layout of the furniture may influence the indoor daylighting distribution. Several various furniture layouts can be arranged in a residential working room. However, to have better generalisation, this study focused on the impacts of mostly-used-furniture-layouts (MUFLs) on indoor daylighting performance in residential working rooms. The field measurement was conducted in a typically furnished room under a tropical sky to validate the results of the simulation software under different sky conditions. Then, daylight ratio (DR), as a quantitative daylighting variable, and the illuminance uniformity ratio (IUR), CIE glare index (CGI), and Guth visual comfort probability (GVCP), as qualitative daylighting variables, were analysed through simulation experiments. In conclusion, by changing the furniture layout, daylight uniformity recorded the highest fluctuations in the case room among all variables. While various furniture layouts, in a residential working room in the tropics, may even slightly reduce the extreme indoor daylight quantity, they can worsen the indoor daylight quality compared to an unfurnished space. The paper shows that furniture as an interior design parameter cannot help to improve tropical daylighting performance in a building.