Interactions between Thermal and Visual (Dis-)Comfort and Related Adaptive Actions through Cluster Analyses

The objectives of this study are to analyze interactions between thermal and visual influences on comfort and behaviors and to present a clustering method based on the results of mixed-effect regression analyses for simulation and control purposes. Results show a) interactions between thermal and visual influences on comfort and behavior, b) the advantage of this method in creating independent and distinct patterns related to thermal comfort, visual comfort, and occupant behavior, and c) that the relationship between clusters e.g. between clusters of thermal and visual comfort or between thermal comfort and heating behavior is not significant

Long-term monitoring data from a naturally ventilated office building

Data was collected in the field, from an office building located in Frankfurt, Germany, over the period of 4 years. The building was designed as a low-energy building and featured natural ventilation for individual control of air quality as well as buoyancy-driven night ventilation in combination with a central atrium as a passive cooling strategy. The monitored data include in total 116 data points related to outdoor and indoor environmental data, energy related data, and data related to occupancy and occupant behaviour. Data points representing a state were logged with the real timestamp of the event taking place, all other data points were recorded in 10 minute intervals. Data were collected in 17 cell offices with a size of ~20 m2, facing either east or west). Each office has one fixed and two operable windows, internal top light windows between office and corridor (to allow for night ventilation into the atrium) and sun protection elements (operated both manually and automatically). Each office is occupied by one or two persons

Integrating Human Satisfaction into the Design Phase – Generating Motivation and Knowledge in Architectural Education

The design of sustainable cities and buildings needs to include thoughts on circumstances influencing human satisfaction be it for thermal, visual, or other dimensions of human perception. While human satisfaction should be regarded as a dimension of sustainability alone, the provision of thermal and visual satisfaction is also a key driving force for energy use in buildings. Research on human perception of the built environment and their interactions with it has a long tradition. At the same time, open research questions especially with respect to the interaction between different dimensions of human perception, e.g. the effect of thermal stimuli on visual perception, are part of the current debate within the research community. In contrast, the amount of scientific knowledge related to human satisfaction transferred to architectural students is low and consequences of their decisions during design studio works for the later occupants are seldom addressed. This paper describes the experiences and results of a teaching experiment, in which architectural students were asked to reflect their own design work finished in a previous year with respect to effects on human satisfaction by means of experimental studies. The research questions raised were a) which design issues can be investigated through experimental studies, and b) to what extent can the motivation of architectural students towards the topic of occupants’ satisfaction be raised. A seminar consisting of three phases was conducted in two consecutive summers. First, students received input related to scientific methods, thermal and visual perception, and had to reflect on one of their previous design works in order to extract research questions and hypotheses. In the second phase, students had to design and conduct a small experimentalstudy related to their research questions. In addition, they had to participate in the experiments organized by their fellow students. In the third phase, the experimental data was analysed and had to be presented together with the reflection of consequences for future design works. The results of this teaching experiment show the huge variety of design issues dealt with in the context of this seminar. Research questions originating from the students were in parts related to cutting edge research questions such as the interaction between different dimensions of perception. From the perspective of a raised motivation, a large number of students showed great interest in the topic, participated with enthusiasm, and evaluated this seminar very high. Limitations have to be seen in the small sample sizes reachable by this seminar approach with many experiments being conducted with less than 10 participants due to limited resources in time and budget, and in the low level of statistical knowledge, which is not part of architectural education

The ambivalence of personal control over indoor climate - how much personal control is adequate?

Literature sets personal control over indoor environmental conditions in relation to the gap between predicted and actual energy use, the gap between predicted and observed user satisfaction, and health aspects. A focus on building energy performance often leads to the proposal of more automated and less occupant control of the indoor environment. However, a high degree of personal control is desirable because research shows that a low degree (or no) personal control highly correlates with indoor environmental dissatisfaction and sick building syndrome symptoms. These two tendencies seem contradictory and optimisation almost impossible. Based on current efficiency classes describing the effect of room automation systems on building energy use during operation, fundamental thoughts related to thermophysiology and control, recent laboratory experiments, important lessons learnt from post-occupancy studies, and documented conceptual frameworks on the level of control perceived, we discuss the ambivalence of personal control and how much personal control is adequate. Often-proposed solutions ranging from fully automated controls, over manual controls to dummy controls are discussed according to their effect on a) building energy use during operation and b) occupants perceived control. The discussion points to the importance of adequate personal control. In order to meet the goals for nearly zero energy buildings and for a human-centric design, there is the need to establish design procedures for adequate personal control as part of the design process

Does thermal control improve visual satisfaction? Interactions between occupants’ self-perceived control, visual, thermal, and overall satisfaction

Occupants’ satisfaction had been researched independently related to thermal and visual stimuli for many decades showing among others the influence of self-perceived control. Few studies revealed interactions between thermal and visual stimuli affecting occupant satisfaction. In addition, studies including interactions between thermal and visual stimuli are lacking different control scenarios. This study focused on the effects of thermal and visual factors, their interaction, seasonal influences, and the degree of self-perceived control on overall, thermal, and visual satisfaction. A repeated-measures laboratory study with 61 participants running over two years and a total of 986 participant sessions was conducted. Mixed model analyses with overall satisfaction as outcome variable revealed that thermal satisfaction and visual satisfaction are the most important predictors for overall satisfaction with the indoor environment. Self-perceived thermal control served as moderator between thermal satisfaction and overall satisfaction. Season had slight influence on overall satisfaction. Random effects explained the highest amount of variance, indicating that intra- and interindividual differences in the ratings of satisfaction are more prevalent than study condition. Future building design and operation plans aiming at a high level of occupant satisfaction should consider personal control opportunities and take into account the moderating effect of control opportunities in multimodal interactions

Komfortlabor 1 + 2

Bürogebäude werden errichtet, damit Nutzer sich darin aufhalten und komfortabel arbeiten können. Für die nachhaltige Nutzung von Gebäuden sind neben dem Energieverbrauch in erster Linie das Nutzerverhalten und die Nutzerzufriedenheit entscheidend. Doch was führt dazu, dass wir uns in einem Raum klimatisch wohl fühlen, dass es uns nicht zu heiß, zu kalt, zu hell oder zu dunkel ist? Was bedeutet „Komfortempfinden“ und wie können in einem Komfortlabor wissenschaftliche Erkenntnisse gewonnen werden, die Entwurfsentscheidungen unterstützen? Das arch.lab ist eine Plattform für Forschung in der Lehre an der Fakultät Architektur. Es hat die Aufgabe, forschungsorientiertes Studieren und Lehren im Kontext der Studiengänge Architektur und der Kunstgeschichte zu entwickeln und zu fördern. Je Studienjahr vergibt das arch.lab bis zu sechs Förderungen an Seminarkonzepte der Fakultät, die für das neu eingeführte Modul „Forschungsfelder“ im Masterstudiengang Architektur entwickelt werden

What does “moderate pain” mean? Subgroups holding different conceptions of rating scales evaluate experimental pain differently

Background Pain ratings are almost ubiquitous in pain assessment, but their variability is high. Low correlations of continuous/numerical rating scales with categorical scales suggest that individuals associate different sensations with the same number on a scale, jeopardizing the interpretation of statistical results. We analysed individual conceptions of rating scales and whether these conceptions can be utilized in the analysis of ratings of experimental stimuli in pain‐free healthy individuals and people with reoccurring/persistent pain. Methods Using a free positioning task, healthy participants (N = 57) and people with reoccurring/persistent pain (N = 57) ad libitum positioned pain descriptors on lines representing intensity and un‐/pleasantness scales. Furthermore, participants rated experimental thermal stimuli on visual analogue scales with the same end anchors. A latent class regression approach was used to detect subgroups with different response patterns in the free positioning task, indicating different conceptions of pain labels, and tested whether these subgroups differed in their ratings of experimental stimuli. Results Subgroups representing different conceptions of pain labels could be described for the intensity and the un‐/pleasantness scale with in part opposing response patterns in the free positioning task. Response patterns did not differ between people with and without pain, but in people with pain subgroups showed differential ratings of high intensity experimental stimuli. Conclusions Individuals\u27 conceptions of pain labels differ. These conceptions can be quantified and utilized to improve the analysis of ratings of experimental stimuli. Identifying subgroups with different conceptions of pain descriptions could be used to improve predictions of responses to pain in clinical contexts. Significance The present results provide a novel approach to incorporate individual conceptualizations of pain descriptors, which can induce large distortions in the analysis of pain ratings, in pain assessment. The approach can be used to achieve better pain estimates, representing individual conceptions of pain and achieving a better comparability between individuals but also between pain‐free persons and patients with chronic pain. Particularly, in clinical settings this could improve quantification of perceived pain and the patient‐clinician communication

A picture is worth a thousand words: Smartphone photograph-based surveys for collecting data on office occupant adaptive opportunities

In the past several decades, psychological aspects have been become important to holistic building occupant comfort and satisfaction evaluations. Psychological dimensions of comfort include occupants’ opportunities to interact with their indoor environment and perceived control over the indoor environment. Current post-occupancy evaluations tend to focus on collecting quantitative data, despite overwhelming evidence that contextual factors can profoundly impact occupant comfort. This paper proposes and tests a novel method for data collection to study adaptive comfort opportunities. A smartphone-based survey was developed to concurrently collect office occupants’ subjective evaluations of usability and comfort of spaces, in addition to photographs of all key building interfaces. The photos were coded to obtain quantitative characteristics of offices, such as whether the interface is obstructed. With a sample of 39 office workers, this paper reveals the effectiveness of this novel photographbased survey method, while also providing some initial quantitative and qualitative results

Occupants’ perception of historical buildings’ indoor environment. Two case studies.

In Europe, some historical cities have more than 50% of buildings dated from before 1920. Nowadays, these buildings faces challenges when adapted to the current necessities of livability, environmental and economical sustainability. Literature demonstrates that occupants’ comfort perception and consequent behavior affect buildings’ energy efficiency and are influenced also by the building configuration. Despite a large number of studies in literature investigating occupants’ behavior and comfort in different situations, there is a lack of such studies for historical buildings. Therefore, the objective of this paper was to characterize occupants’ thermal and comfort perception in two historical buildings during summer season. In these terms, results of objective measures were compared to occupants’ evaluations of the indoor environment. Results showed that, for both case studies, despite the good thermal performances of the building fabrics and the fact that almost all of the occupants like to work in a historical building (they would also choose it instead of a modern one), most of them didn’t rate the building as comfortable from a thermal point of view