Green building design and visual persuasion on occupants' pro-environmental behaviours

It is of interest to know whether and how green building design can communicate green messages to the occupants and lead to their pro-environmental behaviours. The distinctive power of building elements as visual objects and their use for visual persuasion has not been studied in the context of green buildings. A preliminary survey was carried out in Melbourne Council House 2 and the results showed the potential of using green building design as a persuasion tool to influence the occupants' pro-environmental behaviours. This finding ensured the necessity of a future full-study to extract: 1) the effectiveness of the (visual) green building design on persuading occupants to behave more pro-environmentally at building-level; and 2) the effects due to the occupants' awareness and perception of the green design at individual-level. A hierarchical regression model with Bayesian inference was proposed and tested with fake data simulation.