Environmental factors including thermal, visual, air, and acoustic quality have significant impacts on people’s wellbeing and health. In the context of the built environment, the study of human responses to environmental stimuli is fundamental for the design and operation of buildings that aim at consuming a limited amount of energy while satisfying occupants’ needs. Over the last decades, many studies concerning the Indoor Environmental Quality (IEQ) have been conducted. By understanding human responses to environmental stimuli, it is possible to identify threshold values, indexes, and models capturing such responses, which in turn can be used to design and control buildings to achieve tailored comfort conditions. At the same time, increasing attention has been paid to the Outdoor Environmental Quality (OEQ) for community urban spaces. Due to the extended amount of time that people spend indoors (about 90% in EU) and to the positive effects of spending time in natural or community urban spaces, IEQ and OEQ studies and application contribute to the achievement of sustainable development goals, including the improvement of people’s health and wellbeing and the growth of sustainable cities and communities.
The scientific literature is rich in references regarding the evaluation of human responses to environmental stimuli, both in controlled environments and in field studies, through Post Occupancy Evaluations or in-situ interviews. Regarding this aspect, human-centric approaches are becoming increasingly popular in the scientific community for three main reasons. First, due to the intrinsic nature of human preferences and responses, peculiar to each individual and defined by not only the environmental stimuli but also by other external factors (e.g., sex, age, culture, expectations). Second, due to the different types of adaptive responses of people to environmental stimuli, categorized into behavioral, physiological, and psychological. Third, due to the unique exposure to specific environmental stimuli, characterized by their combination and interactions, to which everyone is subject. The aim of this Research Topic is to gather innovative human-centric research aimed at understanding the complex multisensory interaction between occupants and building technologies and at defining new models that fill the gap of the current methodologies to design comfortable, usable, adaptable, and energy-efficient buildings and public spaces also through the use of new technologies (wearables and nearables) and approaches, such as Internet of Things (IoT), Virtual Reality (VR), and Machine Learning (ML) techniques.
In this context, this Frontiers' Research Topic intends to give you the possibility to submit original research covering the human-centric investigations. Topics of interest include but are not limited to:
• Human perception and responses to combined environmental stimuli
• Interactions between occupants and building technologies
• New human-centric models
• Innovative human-centric sensing technologies
• Innovative human-centric building control technologies
• Energy implications of human-centric approaches
• Design implications of human-centric approaches
• Multisensory interactions between occupants and urban environments
Topic Editor Giorgia Chinazzo is Co-Founder of the company Spectrace. The other Topic Editors declare no competing interests with regard to the Research Topic subject.
Environmental factors including thermal, visual, air, and acoustic quality have significant impacts on people’s wellbeing and health. In the context of the built environment, the study of human responses to environmental stimuli is fundamental for the design and operation of buildings that aim at consuming a limited amount of energy while satisfying occupants’ needs. Over the last decades, many studies concerning the Indoor Environmental Quality (IEQ) have been conducted. By understanding human responses to environmental stimuli, it is possible to identify threshold values, indexes, and models capturing such responses, which in turn can be used to design and control buildings to achieve tailored comfort conditions. At the same time, increasing attention has been paid to the Outdoor Environmental Quality (OEQ) for community urban spaces. Due to the extended amount of time that people spend indoors (about 90% in EU) and to the positive effects of spending time in natural or community urban spaces, IEQ and OEQ studies and application contribute to the achievement of sustainable development goals, including the improvement of people’s health and wellbeing and the growth of sustainable cities and communities.
The scientific literature is rich in references regarding the evaluation of human responses to environmental stimuli, both in controlled environments and in field studies, through Post Occupancy Evaluations or in-situ interviews. Regarding this aspect, human-centric approaches are becoming increasingly popular in the scientific community for three main reasons. First, due to the intrinsic nature of human preferences and responses, peculiar to each individual and defined by not only the environmental stimuli but also by other external factors (e.g., sex, age, culture, expectations). Second, due to the different types of adaptive responses of people to environmental stimuli, categorized into behavioral, physiological, and psychological. Third, due to the unique exposure to specific environmental stimuli, characterized by their combination and interactions, to which everyone is subject. The aim of this Research Topic is to gather innovative human-centric research aimed at understanding the complex multisensory interaction between occupants and building technologies and at defining new models that fill the gap of the current methodologies to design comfortable, usable, adaptable, and energy-efficient buildings and public spaces also through the use of new technologies (wearables and nearables) and approaches, such as Internet of Things (IoT), Virtual Reality (VR), and Machine Learning (ML) techniques.
In this context, this Frontiers' Research Topic intends to give you the possibility to submit original research covering the human-centric investigations. Topics of interest include but are not limited to:
• Human perception and responses to combined environmental stimuli
• Interactions between occupants and building technologies
• New human-centric models
• Innovative human-centric sensing technologies
• Innovative human-centric building control technologies
• Energy implications of human-centric approaches
• Design implications of human-centric approaches
• Multisensory interactions between occupants and urban environments
Topic Editor Giorgia Chinazzo is Co-Founder of the company Spectrace. The other Topic Editors declare no competing interests with regard to the Research Topic subject.
