Socio-Spatial Comfort

Abstract

A well-designed workplace has a direct and significant impact on our work experiences and productivity. In this paper, we investigate how office interior layouts influence the way we socially experience office buildings. We extend the previous work that examined static social formations of office workers by looking at their dynamic movements during informal desk visiting interactions. With a month of video data collected in the office, we implemented a vision-based analysis system that enables us to examine how people occupy space in social contexts in relation to desk configurations. The results showed that both social territoriality and approach path highlight social comfort in human-building interactions, which are different from efficiency or path optimization. From these findings, we propose the concepts of socio-spatial comfort: social buffers, privacy buffers, and varying proxemics to inform a user-centered way of designing human building interactions and architecture.

Generative design for COVID-19 and future pathogens using stochastic multi-agent simulation

“…Another major challenge is how to validate the behavioural and physical models on an ongoing basis. Human behaviour can potentially be modelled in a data-driven fashion using computer vision, which raises its own set of opportunities and additional challenges ( Lee et al, 2020 ). Virus models can be validated and improved using air flow and quality sensors, as well as by recreating and simulating well documented historical outbreak scenarios, as mentioned in Section 5.1 .…”

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

“…This has particularly come to the fore during the global COVID-19 pandemic, which has both forced people to work from home, but also increased discussion of the possible values of home-working, post-pandemic (Khazan, 2020). The majority of past research on workplaces focuses on office buildings (Fortmann et al, 2013;Mark et al, 2015;Aryal et al, 2018;Alavi et al, 2018b;Clear et al, 2018;Lee et al, 2021). There have been extensive studies concerning the potential role of digital technology in supporting the well-being of office workers (see for example, Ludden and Meekhof, 2016).…”

“…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.…”