Parkinson and de Dear studied links between temperature and positive environmental experiences. They report that “the experiments presented in this paper and the prequels in this series point to the importance of context, in the indoor setting and also the bodily state of the occupant, in determining whether a given thermal environmental variation will be” felt to be pleasurable or unpleasant. Parkinson and de Dear share that “A pragmatic design solution to the…individual differences inherent in…thermal preferences is to provide PEC [personal environmental control] options to occupants…variables such as the target area, rate of cooling and temporal profile of peripheral heat should be controllable by the individual. By embedding PEC systems in workstations, occupants can create bespoke micro-environments that are capable of eliciting positive hedonic [pleasurable] tones…PEC permits this without the individual’s thermal preferences impinging upon the environment of others…not everyone experiences the same quality or intensity of thermal pleasure from the same thermal stimuli.”
Thomas Parkinson and Richard de Dear. 2017. “Thermal Pleasure in Built Environments: Spatial Alliesthesia from Air Movement.” Building Research and Information, vol. 45, no. 3, pp. 320-335.
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.