Refresh: Remodeling Building Design Sustainability from a Human Centered Approach

More than two thirds of the worlds population will be living in cities by 2050, which made sustainable cities a key theme at the Rio+20 Summit. Over 40% of the UK population live their working lives carrying out knowledge work in offices - enclosed spaces in the built environment. Over 40% of the UK's GDP is driven by the knowledge work carried out in these buildings. While these buildings must meet basic environmental and safety standards, building codes are primarily defined around the performance of the physical infrastructure rather than capturing the performance of a person in a building in a city. Indeed, the energy agenda has recently focused on making these work environments as air tight and thus as energy efficient as possible. But what if this energy efficiency is costing our wellbeing, and thus our performance and capacity to contribute to environmental, economic and social sustainability? We are all familiar with working in buildings that are overhot, stuffy and have seemingly no air flow, and how our performance seems to suffer as a result. Yet such environments may be well within building specifications for environmental quality. There is a clear need to be able to quantify the impact of indoor air on human performance and determine what is optimal for quality performance.

We hypothesize that poor indoor environments are the result of approaching building performance on the basis of (1) what is easy to measure (e.g. energy/carbon) and (2) without properly considering effects of the environment on human cognitive performance. Poor design may have such a critical impact on the creativity and innovation required for knowledge work that we need a radical shift in design focus. That radical reconsideration may show that even small changes not just to design, but to the way information about both the building and the person is presented, may significantly improve performance.

The goals of the Refresh project are to put the human at the centre of building performance and to develop new measures and models that better capture the complexity of these interactions. We plan to measure the *dynamic* changes in and around the local environment on human performance in that environment. These measures will give us ways to create new models of building environments that in turn will be available to help inform policy for building quality that takes human wellbeing in these environments into account. These models will also help us to design new kinds of environmental interaction tools. For instance, much current attention is focused on smart meters to encourage us to change our behaviour around energy use. This is a very one-way view of our interaction with a buiding; it's all building to human. What if the building, however, knew something about our state and tasks? Would we be able to present a co-interaction meter that might suggest opening a window or going for a walk to get some air in order to complete a task when we're apparently becoming sluggish?


Our proposal brings together a novel mix of ICT and engineering sciences. As such, our results will affect a range of disciplines. Overall, our research explicitly aims to develop a methodology for assessing indoor climate for human performance as the outdoor microclimate is altered due to a changing neighbourhood. We will discover how dynamic changes may enable us to create not just a sustainable indoor environment, but an indoor environment which sustains. We will enhance the present energy-dominated portfolio of built environment research by taking a holistic view and integrating explicit feedbacks between urban microclimate, ventilation and human performance. Our approach will provide guidance on how to meet energy efficiency targets without compromising productivity.

IMPACT ON KNOWLEDGE includes quantitative evidence for the inter-relationships between people, their buildings and the urban microclimate, a new sustainability framework for buildings, and advances in methods for measuring and modelling physical and human interactions, particularly in dynamic conditions. Impact on People includes but is not limited to the research team and their wider network of collaborations. Investigators will establish a long term research partnerships; PDRA's will gain cross-disciplinary expertise and associated PhD students will be trained in a vibrant new research environment.
IMPACT ON SOCIETY arises through outputs enabling new citizen participation in environment/self-performance interaction and evaluation; it will run through policy and guidance at city and building level, each of which leads to improved workplace environments and long term health and quality of life benefits.
IMPACT ON THE ECONOMY arises through efficiency and innovation. Improvements in productivity benefit individual employers and the wider economy. Outcomes will stimulate technological advancements in areas such as ventilation design, building control and user focused smart devices.

1. Dissemination & collaboration: Impact starts with awareness. Papers in leading journals and conferences (discipline specific and broad challenge areas) will validate our evidence. We will use and build our international research networks to develop methods and build on results; visits to leading groups (e.g. Denmark's National Research Centre for the Working Environment) are in the project plan. Our Advisory Forum offers a route to academic, industry and policy impact as well as building new collaborations; the Forum will be formed at an early stage and participate in the first strategy meeting. Invited national (yr 2) and international workshops (yr 4) will enable targeted dissemination and definition of key future needs.
2. Initiating change: We will conduct our "in-the-wild" studies at the offices of organizations who can themselves act on the research findings both in their own work environment and in what they design for others. Through engagement throughout the project with industry stakeholders who are already established partners (e.g. Arup, Breathing Buildings, Microsoft Research) our work will inform development of key technologies in the green economy: natural ventilation systems, novel mechanical ventilation systems, retrofit services for human performance optimization and innovative IT design to support these interactions for performance. We will use linked PhD and EngD projects to initiate potential technological advances. We will use our networks and our advisory forum to connect to policy/guidance at society (DCLG, DECC) and building specific (CIBSE, BRE, BSRIA) level to set a roadmap for integrating evidence.
3. Advocacy: Through our academic, industry and citizen outreach events, we will inspire researchers and innovators in industry and the public. PhD students will be "fast-tracked" to a research career through training via this high-profile project; UG students will support project work to gain experience of cutting-edge research. We will develop web-based "citizen science" resources to support individuals, students and organizations to test their own environment (i.e. through the International Association for Urban Climate). We will collaborate on material aimed at schools (i.e. through STEMNET) to raise understanding of building/person interaction as well as deploy a highly publicized and innovative on-line national survey of the "state of the nations workplaces". Our final measurement stage will include "open experiments" where we will invite academic groups and workplaces of the nation to participate.