Introducing User aspects

Indoor comfort

Holistic Indoor Comfort

Human memory and perception of environment is considered via designing with strategies emphasizing the user expectation of affordance of a certain space. Affordances refer to “the possibilities for use, intervention and action offered in a given situation in a given space” (Fich, 2020 (Clark, 1999)). Elements as color, materials and their tactility play a key role to evoke a certain atmosphere or expected use. A sort of storytelling via physical elements giving the building the ability to non-verbally communicate with the user. The expectation and experience of physical elements relates directly to human perception of colour and atmosphere, previous experience stored as memory developed into one’s subjective preference for aesthetics of space. The homeostatic balance refers to the circumstance that goes for any human being that the perception relies on the bodily reaction to the experience of being, as described by Pallasmaa: “For any living organism, the question of staying alive is a question of its interior vs. exterior.” (Fich, 2020, (Pallasmaa, 2008)). It can e.g. be addressed via mapping wished atmospheres wanted to be enhanced in certain rooms.

When designing for human comfort in practice considerations are often towards generic standards developed by specialists at research institutes in the strive to obtain the most optimal physical surroundings. This as research finds it impossible for designers to obtain perfect comfort conditions for all users, especially in buildings with many users. As a consequence, qualitative aspects of user comfort is neglected, reducing comfort to inhumane physics, avoiding human individual preferences and experiences of when one is in comfort, and the fact that comfort actually relies on this previous described body and mind language of bodily interaction with environment corresponding with the human psyche.

This calls for an expanding of indoor comfort aims towards design elements that compliments and stimulates the users physiological and psychological wellbeing, by bringing materials, colours, and contextual conditions of nature into play.

Evaluation

Figure 30 Homeostatic balance