Living with an autonomous spatiotemporal home heating system: Exploration of the user experiences (UX) through a longitudinal technology intervention-based mixed-methods approach Martin Kruusimagi et al Abstract. The concept of 'comfort' has been influential in shaping aspects of our built environment. For the construction industry, comfort is predominantly understood in terms of the balance between an ideal human physiological state and a finite number of measurable environmental parameters that can be controlled (temperature, humidity, air quality, daylighting, noise). It is such a notion of comfort that has informed the establishment of universally applied comfort standards and guidelines for the built environment. When buildings rigidly conform to these standards, they consume vast quantities of energy and are responsible for higher levels of GHG emissions. Recent researchers have challenged such instrumental definitions of comfort on moral and environmental grounds. In this paper, we address this issue from two different standpoints: one empirical, one related to the design of technology.Empirically, we present an analysis of ethnographic field material that has examined how, in what circumstances, and at what times ordinary users employ energy-intensive indoor climate technologies in their daily lives. We argue that when comfort is viewed as an achievement, rather than as a reified and static ideal homeostasis between humans and their environmental conditions, it becomes easier to appreciate the extent to which comfort is, for ordinary people, personally idiosyncratic, culturally relative, socially influenced and highly dependent on temporality, sequence and activity. With respect to design, we introduce a set of provocative designed prototypes that embody alternative conceptions of 'comfort' than those to which the building industry typically subscribes.Our discussion has critical implications for the types of technologies that result from a 'comfort standards' conception. Firstly, we show that comfort is not simply a homeostatic equilibrium-such a view is overly narrow, inflexible and ultimately an inaccurate conception of what comfort is for ordinary people; secondly, that it promotes technologies that treat environmental parameters as variables for our manipulation, rather than opportunities to reflect on, and adjust our own (temporal human) fit with our environment. Borrowing from Cole et al.[4], we argue for technologies that enable users to inhabit rather than occupy the built environment. IntroductionA rather peculiar notion of 'comfort' has been responsible for the development of certain international building standards, in spite of widely variable global climate conditions. An optimal, productive and comfortable indoor environment is being held up as the product of stable, predictable and universal comfort conditions, in the form of noise, daylighting, air quality, humidity, and temperature established to correspond to a determinate human 'comfort zone.' Technological systems and products are de...
This paper deals critically with the way people's "comfort zone" is conceptualized within the indoor climate context. It draws attention to the emergence of international building guidelines and standards which engineers and architects use when designing a building, that describe the "comfort zone" as a narrow, optimal, steady state of "neutrality" of the human body with its immediate, physical environment. Scientists from different fi elds have been recently suggesting that this conceptualization is unsustainable and based on false assumptions about the relationship and interaction between people and their environment. In order to reconcile sustainability with the built environment's demand for comfort, the practitioners of sustainable architecture and design as well as policy-makers may greatly benefi t from understanding people's current social practices, values and visions with regard to comfort; to enable people's acknowledgement and ability to adapt to sustainable, new ways of operating and managing one's indoor environment, it may be of advantage to be able to account for the socially accepted, everyday (non-) sustainable actions relating to one's comfort which can be, in some cases, rigorous and resistant to change. This paper outlines a case where researchers have empirically studied the building inhabitant's own judgments and values and his actual experience with regard to comfort in everyday life. In parallel qualitative and quantitative data within the user's context, in this case the building inhabitant's context, were collected while researchers took the role of the observer-as-participant and followed Danish families how they practice "comfort" during an ordinary day at home, work and school. From the data, an interpretation about the above phenomenon is illustrated in detail showing how situational, temporal and idiosyncratic "ordinary" people's values and decision making relating to their personal management of the indoor environment are, and the relevance for sustainable building design is demonstrated. The results presented underline the signifi cance of looking beyond e.g. measuring physical parameters and following international building guidelines, when being on the search for comfort " factors" and adaptive opportunities in future sustainable building design.
This article introduces two theoretical perspectives on users' creative appropriations of new products which underline that product adoption goes beyond the moment of buying a product. It points out that successful and sustainable product adoption arises from enabling users' concrete action to creatively adopt and integrate a product into existing or emergent practices. Within the discipline of design, users' everyday life has been acknowledged to be full of hacks and workarounds. Everyday life has been recognized as a highly variable and complex unit of analysis which, according to some sociologists, gets continuously shaped and re-shaped by materials, images and skills within the boundary of what is called ‘a practice'. This paper will elaborate on two perspectives – design in-use and practice theory – to articulate an extended view on product adoption that could take into account the dynamics and the relevance of users' creative efforts in their everyday lives. It will suggest some guidelines for innovation managers, product developers and others who deal with issues related to product adoption.
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