Daylight performance and users’ visual appraisal for green building offices in Malaysia

•Office daylighting design has to take interior layout and porosity into consideration.•Daylight field measurement of two office spaces shows 53% and 41% lighting savings.•No significant difference in visual appraisal despite difference in Daylight Factor coverage.•Daylight Factor alone is not accurate and sufficient to justify daylight performance.•Visual Appraisal, Lighting Energy Savings and Discomfort Glare do not correlate with Daylight Factor. Lighting energy savings, as well as visual and non-visual user benefits have been widely attributed to daylighting. This paper explores daylight design strategy, visual appraisal, Daylight Factor (DF), lighting energy usage and discomfort glare using two green building offices in Malaysia, which have incorporated daylighting into both façade and interior design. Visual appraisal surveys were collected from 39 and 145 subjects in the open plan working space of the Energy Commission Building (ECB) and Public Works Department Block G (PWD), respectively. The survey focused on task brightness, colour appearance, uniformity and lighting preference. Discomfort glare assessed via occupant point-of-view luminance maps was juxtaposed here from a glare study involving the same buildings. Illuminance loggers were used to monitor artificial lighting usage as well as the DF on a selected floor of each building. There were no significant differences in occupant responses to the visual appraisal survey for both office spaces. Using MS1525:2014 and Green Building Index (GBI NRNC) tool as baselines, the DF performance of both offices differs significantly: PWD had a 45.5% daylit area, with ECB a 14.8% daylit area for DF >1%. However, lighting energy usage results show substantial savings of 53% and 41% occurred from daylighting. These findings of visual appraisal, DF, lighting energy savings and discomfort glare show a discrepancy in using only the DF to justify the daylight performance of an office space in a tropical climate such as Malaysia. The findings suggest that equivalent consideration should be given to interior design to facilitate daylighting, which is often beyond the control of designer, but in the hands of office end users.