Women are cold in offices for a good reason, it turns out. Kingma and Lichtenbelt report that, “Indoor climate regulations are based on an empirical thermal comfort model that was developed in the 1960s… Standard values for one of its primary variables –metabolic rate – are based on an average male, and may overestimate female metabolic rate by up to 35%…This may cause buildings to be intrinsically non- energy efficient in providing comfort to females. Therefore, we make a case to use actual metabolic rates…Ultimately, an accurate representation of thermal demand of all occupants leads to actual energy consumption predictions and real energy savings of buildings that are designed and operated by the buildings services community.”
Currently, many office temperatures are set at 70 degrees Fahrenheit, a temperature that’s comfortable for most men. However, many women would be comfortable at 75 degrees Fahrenheit, which makes life difficult. The solution may well be providing people with the opportunity to control the temperature at their own workspace or to relocate easily to spaces in their workplace with different temperatures.
Boris Kingma and Wouter Lichtenbelt. “Energy Consumption in Buildings and Female Thermal Demand.” Nature Climate Change, in press.
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.
