Comfort: A Coordinate of User Experience in Interactive Built Environments

Abstract

Comfort as a technical term in the domain of architecture has been used meticulously to describe, assess, and understand some of the essential qualities of buildings, across four dimensions: visual, thermal, acoustic, and respiratory. This body of knowledge can be drawn upon to shed light on the growing branch of HCI that pursues a shift from "artifact" to "environment" (and from "usability" to "comfort"). We contribute to this conceptual-contextual transition in three consecutive steps: 1) sketch the outline of comfort studies in the scholar field of Architecture and the ones in Human-Computer Interaction, 2) propose a schematic model of comfort that captures its interactive characteristics and, 3) demonstrate an interactive tool, called ComfortBox, that we prototyped to help answer some of the research questions about the perception of comfort in built environments.

Understanding the Experiences of Remote Workers: Opportunities for Ambient Workspaces at Home

“…With past literature focusing on conventional office spaces (Alavi et al, 2017;Alavi et al, 2018b), productivity or stress (Alonso et al, 2008;Aryal et al, 2018;Clear et al, 2018;Chodan et al, 2019); there are many potentials for ambient technology in the domestic workplace. The main contribution of this work is to establish knowledge of how remote home workers engage with the workplace at home, what aspects are important for their wellbeing, and what types of ambient feedback would be more appropriate for supporting them.…”

“…A breadth of research has established relationships between physical and environmental factors, and the wellbeing and productivity of employees in office spaces using sensory devices (Alavi et al, 2017;Snow et al, 2017;Aryal et al, 2018;Clear et al, 2018;Constantinides et al, 2020;Lee et al, 2021). Some works study the impact of static spatial features on social interactions and social behavior in the workplace (Mark et al, 2014;Mark et al, 2015;Alavi et al, 2018b).…”

“…Some works study the impact of static spatial features on social interactions and social behavior in the workplace (Mark et al, 2014;Mark et al, 2015;Alavi et al, 2018b). A few projects use sensory devices to study informal human interactions and socio-spatial comfort (Lee et al, 2021) within office spaces, and to inform the future design of workspaces (Alavi et al, 2017;Alavi et al, 2020).…”

“…More recently, a growing body of work is concerned with indoor climate in the office spaces (Alavi et al, 2017;Aryal et al, 2018;Constantinides et al, 2020), it's impact on productivity and wellbeing, and the most appropriate ways to sense, communicate and engage the building occupants in co-shaping it (Snow et al, 2017;Clear et al, 2018;Lee et al, 2021). Alavi et al (2017) addressed the multidimensional issue of comfort in the workplace through Comfortbox -a sensing physical display of environmental data, engaging the office space occupants in gaining awareness on their embodied comfort. Equally, air quality has been the focus of recent HCI and Human-AI Interaction research (Snow et al, 2016;Dang et al, 2020;Kim and Li, 2020;Zhong et al, 2020).…”

Rethinking Wearables in the Realm of Architecture

“…In addition, they can also provide an interactive platform for inhabitants to negotiate their comfort parameters (for example, in case of conflicts resulting from varying thermal perceptions). ComfortBox by Alavi et al [12] is an example of such a tool that affords for awareness about these four dimensions, a possibility to inform the building (through interactions) about levels of acceptable comfort, and communicate one's perceived comfort to other inhabitants.…”