Thermal expectation: Influencing factors and its effect on thermal perception

Schweiker, Marcel; Rissetto, Romina; Wagner, Andreas

doi:10.1016/j.enbuild.2019.109729

Cited by 44 publications

(18 citation statements)

References 32 publications

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“…Nicol and Roaf [ 23 ] explained the concepts of understanding behind the thermal relationship between people and buildings, socio-economic aspects [ 24 ], psychology [ 25 ], physiology [ 26 ] which underlies the related health effects and the ways to interpret the body’s response to the environment either as comfort or discomfort [ 27 ]. Worldwide, the varying cultural and architectural setups have increasing pressures to exacerbate the challenge of comfortable living [ 23 ].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Thermal Discomfort Levels, Building Design Concepts, and Some Heat Mitigation Strategies in Low-Income Communities of a South Asian City

Ehsan

Abbas

Ibrahim

et al. 2021

IJERPH

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Heat stress provokes thermal discomfort to people living in semiarid and arid climates. This study evaluates thermal discomfort levels, building design concepts, and some heat mitigation strategies in low-income neighborhoods of Faisalabad, Pakistan. The outdoor and indoor weather data are collected from April to August 2016 using a weather station installed ad hoc in urban settings, and the 52 houses of the five low-income participating communities living in congested and less environment-friendly areas of Faisalabad. The discomfort index values, related to the building design concepts, including (i) house orientation to sunlight and (ii) house ventilation, are calculated from outdoor and indoor dry-bulb and wet-bulb temperatures. Our results show that although June was the hottest month of summer 2016, based on the monthly mean temperature of the Faisalabad region, the month of May produced the highest discomfort levels, which were higher in houses exposed to sunlight and without ventilation. The study also identifies some popular heat mitigation strategies adopted by the five participating low-income communities during various heat-related health complaints. The strategies are gender-biased and have medical, cultural/customary backgrounds. For example, about 52% of the males and 28% of the females drank more water during dehydration, diarrhea, and eye infection. Over 11% and 19% of the males and females, respectively, moved to cooler places during fever. About 43% of the males and 51% of the females took water showers and rested to combat flu (runny nose), headache, and nosebleed. The people did not know how to cure muscular fatigue, skin allergy (from a type of Milia), and mild temperature. Planting trees in an area and developing open parks with greenery and thick canopy trees can be beneficial for neighborhoods resembling those evaluated in this study.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Thermal Discomfort Levels, Building Design Concepts, and Some Heat Mitigation Strategies in Low-Income Communities of a South Asian City

Ehsan

Abbas

Ibrahim

et al. 2021

IJERPH

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“…Figure 2 presents cognition as the mediator factor between sensations and perceptions. Examples of the effect of cognition over perceptions are the perceived personal control (Luo et al, 2014;Veitch, 2001), expectations (Luo et al, 2016;Schweiker, Rissetto, et al, 2020) and cross-sensorial factors (Chinazzo, Wienold, et al, 2018a;Golasi et al, 2019). As argued earlier in this section, the effect of sensations over perceptions has been acknowledged by building science's comfort models.…”

Section: A Framework For Understanding How Comfort Developsmentioning

confidence: 98%

“…An example of this is that people who have control over their environment seem to evaluate spaces differently from those who do not (Luo et al, 2014;Veitch, 2001). Likewise, people's perception of the indoor environment changes depending on their expectations (Luo et al, 2016;Schweiker, Rissetto, & Wagner, 2020) and on how a space looks and what they believe its temperature to be (Rohles, 2007).…”

Section: Justification For the Researchmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…For instance, evidence suggests that people who have control over their environment might evaluate spaces differently from those who do not (Luo et al, 2014;Veitch, 2001). Likewise, people's perception of the indoor environment changes depending on their expectations (Luo et al, 2016;Schweiker, Rissetto, et al, 2020) and the appearance of a space (Rohles, 2007). Thus, this research is an effort to incorporate "the mind" into building science's comfort research and practice, mitigating the contradiction mentioned earlier.…”

Section: An Unnecessary Contradiction Within Building Science's Comfort Researchmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Therefore, people's intuition can be trusted, at least to a certain point. For instance, Schweiker, Rissetto and Wagner (2020) found that people's thermal expectations are fulfilled the majority of the time, suggesting that people can read the cues on the environment to make relatively accurate inferences about it.…”

Section: A Formal Definition Of Intuitionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Exploring, modelling, and simulating the Feeling of Comfort in residential settings

Molina¹

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The fact that comfort is a subjective state of the mind is widely accepted by engineers, architects and building scientists. Despite this, capturing all the complexity, subjectivity and richness of this construct in models that are useful in building science contexts is far from straightforward. By prioritizing usability, building science has produced models of comfort (e.g., acoustic, visual and thermal) that overly simplify this concept to something nearly objective that can be directly associated with people’s physiology and measurable and quantifiable environmental factors. This is a contradiction because, even if comfort is supposed to be subjective, most of the complexity of “the subject” is avoided by focusing on physiology; and, even if comfort is supposed to reside in the mind, the cognitive processes that characterize the mind are disregarded. This research partially mitigates this contradiction by exploring people’s non-physical personal factors and cognition within the context of their comfort and by proposing a way in which they can be incorporated into building science research and practice. This research refers to these elements together—i.e., people’s non-physical personal factors and cognition—as “the mind”. This research proposes a new qualitative model of the Feeling of Comfort that embraces “the mind”. This model was developed from the results of a first study in which 18 people—from Chile and New Zealand—were asked to describe “a home with good daylight” and “a warm home” in their own words. These results were then replicated in a second study in which another group of 24 people—also from Chile and New Zealand—described “a home with good acoustic performance”, “a home with good air quality” and “a pleasantly cool home”. The Feeling of Comfort model not only was capable of making sense of the new data (gathered in this second study) but also proved to be simple enough to be useful in the context of comfort research and practice. For instance, it guided the development of a quantitative Feeling of Comfort model and also of a prototype building simulation tool that embraces “the mind” and thus can potentially estimate people’s Feeling of Comfort. This research concludes that embracing “the mind” is not only possible but necessary. The reason for this is that “the mind” plays a significant role in the development of people’s comfort. Thus, theories and models of comfort that ignore it fail to represent properly the concept of comfort held by the people for whom buildings are designed. However, incorporating “the mind” into building science’s research and practice implies embracing tools, research methods and conceptual frameworks that have historically not been used by such a discipline. Specifically, it concludes that building science should normalize a more holistic view of comfort and perform more exploratory and qualitative research.

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Indoor environment in office buildings – Perception of personal control and use of adaptive opportunities at workplaces

2022

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Personal control has a considerable impact on individual perception of the indoor climate. This paper's objective is to shed more light on the perception of personal control at office workplaces by analysing: 1) the impact of perceived control on perception of indoor climate, 2) the effect of office type and season on level of control perceived, 3) objectively available adaptive opportunities; 4) subjective perception of their availability; 5) occupants' desire for certain adaptive opportunities; 6) how often and which controls were exercised; and 7) reasons for not exercising available adaptive opportunities. New variables were introduced: i) consistency of perception of controls and ii) conformity to expectation of controls, and their correlation with the level of personal control perceived hypothesised. A longitudinal survey was carried out in three office buildings (two mixed‐mode, one free‐running) in the hot‐summer Mediterranean climate of Amman, Jordan during four seasons. Indoor climate perception correlates positively with perceived control. Office type affects level of perceived control but not season. Most frequent stated reason for not exercising available adaptive opportunities was ‘no need to change’. In this study, perceived control is not correlated with consistency of perception of controls but correlated with conformity to expectation of controls.

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Thermal expectation: Influencing factors and its effect on thermal perception

Cited by 44 publications

References 32 publications

Thermal Discomfort Levels, Building Design Concepts, and Some Heat Mitigation Strategies in Low-Income Communities of a South Asian City

Thermal Discomfort Levels, Building Design Concepts, and Some Heat Mitigation Strategies in Low-Income Communities of a South Asian City

Exploring, modelling, and simulating the Feeling of Comfort in residential settings

Indoor environment in office buildings – Perception of personal control and use of adaptive opportunities at workplaces

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