Author Description

This dissertation, "Usability Assessment Framework for Buildings: a Case Study of School Buildings in Hong Kong" by Jinhua, Wang,, was obtained from The University of Hong Kong (Pokfulam, Hong Kong) and is being sold pursuant to Creative Commons: Attribution 3.0 Hong Kong License. The content of this dissertation has not been altered in any way. We have altered the formatting in order to facilitate the ease of printing and reading of the dissertation. All rights not granted by the above license are retained by the author. Abstract: Building performance assessment must address questions of "who," "what" and "how" to assess, it can be summarized in a formula: Context + Mechanism = Outcome, the context includes two parts, type of building and performance subject. A typical research work will choose one type of building and one subject, and develop a tool for it and do some analysis on the outcome. The research works of this kind are abundant. But in terms of mechanism, they are actually much alike, of which the two most typical ones are Professional-only model and POE process. The absence of practice to enhance the users' capacity to conduct building performance assessment triggers the author to introduce the concept of usability, with spirit of "getting closer to users," and to propose a usability assessment framework to fill up this gap in research field. The exploration of usability assessment is divided into two parts: theoretical construction and practical implementation. In the first part, author will review relevant theories at roots (including at least community psychology, evaluation capacity building (ECB), process in use and equal opportunity theory) and general empowerment evaluation, to come up with a tentative usability assessment framework, of which the empowerment evaluation is the key element, which is initially defined by Fetterman (1994) as "the use of evaluation concepts and techniques to foster self-determination," it takes the "give s