SUSTAINABLE DESIGN SOLUTIONS FOR INDOOR ENVIRONMENT QUALITY OF OFFICE BUILDINGS, CASE OF ETHIO-ICT PARK, ADDIS ABABA, ETHIOPIA

Abstract

IT industry is one of the major sectors of any developing nation which pushes its footprint to becoming developed. Ethiopia is also progressing with the vision of planting multiple IT parks all around the country and the first pilot project introduced in Goro, Bole-Lemi. IT parks are unique in nature in terms of the office working culture the 24-7 working experience can be their distinct behavior. Under such conditions employee�۪s performance in general will be the question that needs certain considerations. Most researches indicate indoor environment is crucial role in determining as well as to enhancing employee�۪s performance. The research task is to propose a sustainable indoor environment conceptual framework and design guideline for the performance and health of employees from the aspect of office type, indoor mean temperature, day lighting, ventilation and indoor acoustic. Although the impact of orientations and window sizes in the resulted indoor environmental comfort was also studied to seize a fruitful design influence. It is expected that improving the indoor environment quality will definitely lead to better employee performance. The findings based on subjective votes; office type is a factor that has a statistically significant impact on health regarding the multivariant analysis applied to the study sample and equivalent to that of logistic regression shows significantly higher risks for ill health and medium-sized and small open plan offices, compared especially with cell-office. In medium-sized open plan and combi-offices the employees show the lowest comfort status. The best chance for acceptable health status and comfort is in cell-offices and flex-offices. The overall result of the study showed that there was significant dissatisfaction in some elements of indoor environmental quality. The overall comfort of the sample buildings from the indoor environmental elements was less than 80% and in relation to this more than 45% of users reported that there was negative impact on their satisfaction and well-being due to the lack of indoor environmental quality.There is one proclamation at federal level concerning building design to ensure safety, comfort and unconstrained services, additional development of architectural building codes, standards and norms in indoor environmental expectations are needed. For instance, the steps taken to modify the indoor thermal condition may affect the other indoor environmental component like noise comfort of the rooms or day lighting. So, it is advisable to start to think from the whole scenario in order to solve every element