Indoor environmental quality (IEQ) significantly impacts people’s comfort, health, and productivity in buildings, and modern green rating systems are primarily focused on energy efficiency rather than the direct user experience. This paper analyses the relationship between IEQ and the perceived quality of life (QoL) of certified and conventional office buildings in Malaysia using a mixed-methods design. The questionnaires were completed by 162 employees working in four open-plan offices: two were certified under the Green Building Index (GBI) established in Malaysia, and two were traditional. This was supplemented by 14 semi-structured interviews and 2 focus groups. The factors of IEQ were divided into ambient, designed, and behavioral environments. It was statistically determined that behavioral factors, such as visual privacy, personalization, ergonomics, and control, exhibited the strongest correlations with overall QoL, compared to ambient factors such as air quality or thermal comfort. Green buildings performed better in terms of daylighting and esthetics than conventional buildings, though they did not always deliver higher occupant satisfaction. The results indicate that current green certification frameworks pay insufficient attention to occupant-centered aspects. The proposed research adds a validated IEQ-QoL framework that predicts the incorporation of subjective user experience into building performance indicators, which can be important for certification reform, post-occupancy evaluation (POE), and human-centered sustainable design approaches.

Enzyme-induced carbonate precipitation (EICP) is an acellular biomineralisation process in which free plant-derived urease catalyses the hydrolysis of urea to precipitate calcium carbonate (CaCO₃), thereby sealing cracks and densifying porous construction materials. EICP has attracted growing interest as a cell-free, shelf-stable, and field-deployable alternative. This critical review synthesises evidence on EICP for the repair of cracks and the enhancement of durability in cementitious and related construction materials. Genuine concrete/mortar crack-repair EICP constitutes the largest experimental category in the field. Across this core, narrow cracks below about 0.3 mm respond to EICP-only treatment with compressive-strength recovery of up to 98.4% and permeability reductions of two to three orders of magnitude, while additive- and fibre-assisted strategies extend the effective repair envelope to approximately 2.0 mm at 45–69% strength restoration. Soybean-derived crude urease is the overwhelmingly preferred source. CaCO₃ polymorph outcome is study- and condition-dependent: calcite dominates the literature, vaterite is characteristic of rapid or narrow-crack precipitation, and additive control can shift the calcite fraction from 38% to 81%. Durability evidence is the field’s weakest dimension, with only one study reporting a coupled freeze–thaw and carbonation dataset and none exceeding roughly six months of monitoring. We discuss why EICP has not attracted the same research intensity as MICP, identify the principal barriers to translation, and outline the standardisation, durability-validation, and regulatory steps required for EICP to mature into a mainstream low-carbon repair technology. These figures are aggregated performance ranges drawn from studies with differing specimen geometries, curing regimes, and loading ages, and are therefore reported as an envelope rather than as directly normalised single values. Because the corpus was assembled principally from Scopus and Web of Science, supplemented by manual searching, relevant studies indexed elsewhere cannot be fully excluded.