Kim and teammates studied worker comfort via data collected in a “typical” office building. As they report, “Personal Comfort Systems (PCS) provide individual occupants local heating and cooling to meet their comfort needs without affecting others in the same space…Recently developed Internet-connected PCS chairs…[can generate] continuous streams of heating and cooling usage data, along with occupancy status and environmental measurements…we carried out a study with PCS chairs…The data analysis shows that (1) local temperatures experienced by individual occupants vary quite widely across different parts of the building, even within the same thermal zone; (2) occupants often have different thermal preferences even under the same thermal conditions;…(4) PCS chairs produce much higher comfort satisfaction (96%) than typically achieved in buildings…PCS not only provide personalized comfort solutions but also offer individualized feedback that can improve comfort analytics and control decisions in buildings.”
Joyce Kim, Fred Bauman, Paul Raftery, Edward Arens, Hui Zhang, Gabe Fierro, Michael Andersen, and David Culler. 2019. “Occupant Comfort and Behavior: High-Resolution Data from a 6-Month Field Study of Personal Comfort Systems with 37 Real Office Workers.” Building and Environment, vo. 148, pp. 348-360, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.buildenv.2018.11.012
Sally Augustin, PhD, a cognitive scientist, is the editor of Research Design Connections (www.researchdesignconnections.com), a monthly subscription newsletter and free daily blog, where recent and classic research in the social, design, and physical sciences that can inform designers’ work are presented in straightforward language. Readers learn about the latest research findings immediately, before they’re available elsewhere. Sally, who is a Fellow of the American Psychological Association, is also the author of Place Advantage: Applied Psychology for Interior Architecture (Wiley, 2009) and, with Cindy Coleman, The Designer’s Guide to Doing Research: Applying Knowledge to Inform Design (Wiley, 2012). She is a principal at Design With Science (www.designwithscience.com) and can be reached at sallyaugustin@designwithscience.com.