The objective of this work is to assess how green building and green building design communicate sustainable messages to the building users and affect their awareness, perception, and knowledge toward sustainability, as well as their pro-environmental behaviors. A corresponding new concept of influential design is proposed to fulfil the research needs. Two research challenges—the theoretical and the methodological challenges—are raised to study the influential design, complemented by three studies. The first study adopted Ajzen’s theory of planned behavior and extracted the building communication mechanism as: 1) active instruction from people; and 2) passive instruction from the building. The second study differentiated the green design elements into visually available or conceptual only green designs and applied hierarchical regression modeling to ensure the analysis at a finer lever and address spatial variations within each building and among different buildings. Finally, using a LEED certified campus residential hall as the study site, the third study empirically tests whether the studied building affords successful communication of sustainable messages to its users. The results suggested that the building could afford to promote the awareness among users, while it could not afford the users’ general knowledge about green building. And users’ perceptions about green designs are experienced at different spatial scales. Key contributions of this work are: 1) transferring a message on the construction of an ecologically aware society; 2) applying the spatial perspective of the building and building design identified to further theoretical research; 3) separating different design elements and performing the analysis at a finer level to extract causality from the built environment; and 4) providing practical evidence for the green building management and insights for understanding the design-environment-use feedback loops. For future work, a specific hypothesis regarding the dichotomous spatial perspectives of a person can be explored as to whether it is more effective to use the green design at building product or space scale to communicate sustainability. It is also suggested to consider factors such as different types of buildings and user groups.
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