ISO Standard for Building Environment Design and Safety

Help is on the way for architects, interior designers, builders, and even regulators who are looking to ensure the health, safety, and well-being of users of interior spaces. It comes in the form of a new ISO standard for indoor visual environments.

According to the ISO, indoor visual comfort means not just comfortable, healthy lighting conditions for carrying out a task. The new ISO standard—ISO 16817:2012 (Building environment design – Indoor environment – Design process for visual environment) –supplies a framework for the parameters that will shape and determine the indoor environment.

ISO 16817 does not impact such standards as ISO 9001 and ISO 27001, but its publication demonstrates the near-universal need for ISO standards and the training associated with them (for instance, ISO 9001 training and ISO 27001 training) in enjoying and taking full advantage of the modern world. ISO 16817 was developed to empower design team members by giving them a process to ensure visual comfort, physiological benefits from healthy lighting, plus energy performance and sustainability of buildings.

“Application of the family of indoor environment design standards developed in ISO/TC 205, Building environment design, help to assure the health, productivity and well-being of building occupants,” said Stephen Turner, chair of ISO/TC. “ISO 1681 will help building designers in particular to provide the desired quality of indoor environment and to achieve a high-performance and high-quality visual environment, while managing interactions with other aspects of project design.”

ISO 16817 introduces an integrated design process for high-quality indoor visual environment. This process includes the architectural and engineering aspects of daylighting and artificial lighting for user well-being and productivity, and also energy performance and sustainability of buildings.

Skylights, windows, and doors, however beneficial to the user’s well-being, can be energy sinkholes. An average house, for instance, loses 30 percent of its heat—or, in a warm environment, 30 percent of its air-conditioning energy—through its fenestration (windows and doors). But with the release of an ISO standard to assess the energy efficiency of windows, much heating (or cooling) energy can be saved and money is not wasted.

ISO 18292:2011 (Energy performance of fenestration systems for residential buildings – Calculation procedure) provides the fenestration industry and designers a scientific and practicable means to assess the energy performance of their products or designs. ISO 18292 allows for a simple and accurate way to calculate the energy performance of windows, doors and skylights, taking into account such practical considerations as the effects of glazing and shading. The standard was designed to allow for the effects of all climatic conditions, as well as relevant building characteristics and installation details.

“A good building envelope is essential when designing sustainable and energy-efficient residential buildings,” noted Thor Endre Lexow, secretary of the subcommittee that developed ISO 18292. “Windows make up a large part of the facades and they play an important part of the total energy performance of the building. By selecting windows with high energy performance the consumers’ energy bill will be lowered and the indoor thermal environment may improve.”