In a recent article in The Atlantic (free at the web address below), Joseph Allen, the director of Harvard’s Healthy Buildings program clearly lays out why effective workplace ventilation is so important. His piece includes information that’s crucial for every workplace designer and manager to know and to apply. For example: “My team at Harvard recently published research on the health of several hundred office workers around the world for more than a year. We found that people performed better on cognition tests when the ventilation rate in their working environment was higher. When they were exposed to more outdoor air, they responded to questions more quickly and got more answers right. Our team reached a similar finding a few years back in a tightly controlled laboratory setting. In that study, people did notably better on cognitive tasks when carbon dioxide made up about 600 parts per million of the air they breathed than when it made up about 1,000 parts per million. . . . In our new research, we observed the effect in real buildings globally. We also observed a reduction of worker performance even at indoor CO2 levels that many researchers had previously assumed were perfectly fine.”
Joseph Allen. 2021. “Employers Have Been Offering the Wrong Office Amenities.” The Atlantic, https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/10/fresh-air-cool-new-office-amenity/620288/
Sally Augustin, PhD, is the editor of Research Design Connections (www.researchdesignconnections.com). Research Design Connections reports on research conducted by social and physical scientists that designers can apply in practice. Insights derived from recent studies are integrated with classic, still relevant findings in concise, powerful articles. Topics covered range from the cognitive, emotional, and physiological implications of sensory and other physical experiences to the alignment of culture, personality, and design, among others. Information, in everyday language, is shared in a monthly subscription newsletter, an archive of thousands of published articles, and a free daily blog. 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.