A user-friendly procedure to visualize the hourly quantitative performance of daylighting systems

The paper reports on the academic experience of teaching daylighting to undergraduate architectural students. The case of teaching daylighting in the architectural professional program at Oklahoma State University is used as a case study. The paper provides a brief survey of the existing design-assisting tools and methods often used, in architectural education, to design and evaluate daylighting systems. These tools are the ones normally found in textbooks that are used to teach regular and/or advanced environmental control courses. As a result of the experimentation with the use of such handy methods in the architectural design studio, a limited benefit was observed. Although these tools can provide a good understanding of the issues and variables that may affect the performance of daylighting systems, students seldom use them in a design studio setting. In contrast, the suggested simplified procedure proved to be user-friendly. It was also found to be capable of visualizing the hourly performance of daylighting systems, and consequently building a comprehensive understanding of the performance of daylighting systems. This hands-on procedure provides quick and meaningful evaluation that can help students to further develop their daylighting designs to meet the predefined goals. The paper does not intend to present a new method of daylighting systems design and/or evaluation. However, it will present a procedure that helped architectural students to visualize, further develop, and comprehensively understand the performance of their daylighting designs. 2003 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved