Thanks to fundamental discoveries from neuroscience, biology and others, we have achieved a deeper understanding of how we interact with our environment. It is time to bring this knowledge back to architecture: we have access to the essential ingredients of human-responsive design, now we need to cook. This requires performance from a human needs standpoint to be considered from a radically new perspective, rooted in interdisciplinary bridging with other domains of fundamental science and inherently dynamic in both the dialog established with the designer and the way diversity and variability of human needs are accounted for. This perspective asks us to move away from evaluating performance as an absolute value ranging from good to bad, because the concept of performance itself becomes dynamic: performance should be measured against goals that might vary over time (variability), by occupant profile (diversity) and/or be subjective (designer’s intent). Daylighting provides an ideal topic of investigation for this quest because of its strong impact on human health and well-being, its close association with (subjective) emotional delight and perceived quality of a space, and its highly dynamic and variable nature derived from a combination of predictable (sun course) and stochastic (weather) patterns.