Adapting to Discomfort Towards Sustainable Built Environments
Project Overview
The buildings sector consumes over one-third of global energy and generates nearly forty percent of carbon dioxide emissions, making it a critical target for sustainability interventions. This project proposes adapting to discomfort as a strategy to lower energy consumption in built environments, rather than relying solely on automation or behaviour modelling. The core premise is that occupants can be supported in tolerating minor environmental discomforts, such as slight variations in temperature or lighting, through carefully designed interactive technologies that preserve personal agency and wellbeing. The project develops a design framework and a set of prototypes that help office occupants adapt to these mild discomforts while maintaining productivity and satisfaction. Co-design workshops conducted with building occupants inform the development of data-driven pervasive interactions that encourage energy-aware behaviours.
In-the-wild studies are carried out to evaluate how the resulting interventions perform in real office settings. These studies run over extended periods, providing evidence of practical effectiveness beyond controlled laboratory conditions. They capture how occupants respond to the designed interactions over time and whether energy savings are sustained.
The research explores the tension between occupant comfort and energy efficiency. It investigates how IoT sensing infrastructure and human-computer interaction techniques can be combined to influence behaviour without coercion. This work contributes to the broader goal of creating sustainable built environments that balance ecological responsibility with the autonomy and wellbeing of their inhabitants.
Team
