Questions of comfort
Challenging research and practice in the built environment
This paper was written as a contribution to the ENERBUILD network, co-ordinated by J.
Owen Lewis, Energy Research Group at University College Dublin. Its purpose is to
stimulate reaction and discussion within the network and beyond.
Comments and corrections are welcome.
Elizabeth Shove
Department of Sociology
Cartmel College
University of Lancaster
LA1 4YL
Tel +44 1524 594610
Email e.shove@lancater.ac.uk
November 2000
Introduction
In common parlance comfort is as strongly associated with sympathy and affection or with
slothful complacency as it is with the indoor environment. Setting these other connotations
aside, I concentrate here on the uses of the concept in the context of building design. There
are many questions one might pursue but in this paper I review the agendas and purposes
of thermal comfort research, concentrating especially upon the capacity to control the indoor
environment, the attribution of responsibility for defining and delivering comfort, 1 and the
challenge of energy conservation.
I suggest that technical understandings of comfort mirror the kinds of questions which have
been asked, and the methods of analysis adopted in response. This approach helps make
sense of existing agendas and allows me to consider new lines of enquiry for the future.
This is not just an academic exercise for research in this field is real in its effects. Like it or
not, technical and physiological investigations have shaped the buildings we inhabit and
influenced our experiences and expectations of normality. It is one thing to appreciate the
part which buildings play in actively constituting comfort, but another to get to grips with the
implications of this observation for the future of sustainable construction across Europe, or
for research in support of this goal.
Going back to the framing of the problem, it helps to distinguish between optimising quests
for comfort, and the deliberate pursuit and maintenance of sociotechnical diversity. The
latter route highlights variety and difference in the meaning and practice of comfort while the
former emphasises convergence and optimisation. The strategy of maximising rather than
minimising the options on offer is already seen as an answer to the problem of comfort, but
so far at an individual rather than a societal or collective level. Various commentators look
forward to a highly controllable future in which building occupants customise their own microenvironments within limits defined by society and its regulators. Although initially attractive,
not least because it positions environmental responsibility fairly and squarely with the enduser or with “society” - and well away from the design professions and associated
researchers - such an approach ducks the broader issue. Choices are culturally as well as
technologically framed and, as the following sections show, designers and researchers make
as well as meet expectations of comfort. Accepting this view, and pushing on, the real
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challenge is to set an agenda for research and hence for building which helps construct
multiple meanings of comfort and multiply “comfortable” societies. But this is to leap ahead.
I begin by turning over a selection of ideas about comfort in order to see something of where
they come from, and something of where they lead. Mine is an analytic, not an exhaustive
exercise. In chasing after the bigger picture I trample across detailed debates and make all
sorts of over-simplifications. The justification and the intention is to see the wood for the
trees and in that way contribute to a better understanding of the social and technical
dynamics of comfort.
Comfort and everyday life
The day-to-day management of the indoor environment is not an isolated enterprise, cut off
from the rest of social life. It is as well to remind ourselves of this point right from the start.
As described by Flandrin, the social lives of 19th century French peasants were, for example,
knitted into strongly seasonal arrangements in which neighbouring families spent winter days
gathered together in the “biggest and warmest cowshed”, only returning home to sleep at
night (Flandrin 1979: 107). The link between patterns of domestic interaction and heating
systems is also illustrated by Wilhite, who explains that in Japan: “The traditional person
heater is the kotatsu, a heating unit placed under the dining table. Even today the kotatsu is
still a focal point for meals for many families, but the habit of bathing and going to bed early
is changing…”(Wilhite 1996: 798). Social-climatic habits are often resistant to change but as
the history of air-conditioning shows they can and do evolve. Describing the deliberate steps
taken to promote mechanical cooling, Gail Cooper notes that “the industry directly addressed
the social rituals of keeping cool. Industry leaders hoped to convince consumers that new
family patterns were one of the advantages of the new technology…researchers reported
that families in these air-conditioned houses… attended fewer movies, organised fewer
picnics, stayed at home more, entertained at home more, and kept the children inside more”
(Cooper 1998: 170). These are not just exotic or archaic examples. In the major urban areas
of the West, many people expect to wear the same sorts of clothing all year round and to
spend over 90% of their time in a more or less uniform indoor environment. Such
arrangements, just like the ones referred to above, have implications for the social
organisation of everyday life, at work as well as at home.
As anthropologists have also observed, heating and cooling technologies, along with other
aspects of routine consumption, carry social meaning and significance. In the Norwegian
context it is, for instance, important to create a “cosy” home, that is one which meets the
convention of having many small lamps placed around the room. By contrast, aesthetic
considerations in Japan favour brightness such that the preferred solution is for one central
fluorescent lamp (Wilhite 1996: 798). Though perplexing to thermal comfort researchers,
the observation that Canadians appear to wear more woolly sweaters than their American
neighbours just across the border (Cena 1994), would not astonish the social researcher.
After all, similar diversity in cultural and symbolic practice is to be found in the sorts of food
which people eat, the routine scheduling of daily routines, and much else besides.
In all societies, including our own, people are surrounded by conventions (albeit ones which
evolve) which define, for each context, what comfort is - and whether the concept makes any
sense at all. Outsiders can describe and try to understand the embedding of associated
habits and technologies, but on what basis can they compare and evaluate comfort
standards? Were Flandrin’s peasants “comfortable”; are the Norwegians really cosier than
their Japanese counterparts? These questions make little sense given the cultural framing of
comfort-related meanings and practices.
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The quest for comfort
However, this line of questioning, a line which tries to discern a path of progress, is quite
acceptable if we switch disciplines and adopt the guise of an historian of technology. The
title of a recent volume produced by the UK’s Chartered Institute of Building Service
Engineers, The Quest for Comfort, (Roberts 1997) illustrates just such an approach. By
implication, the efforts of previous generations of engineers represent steps along the way
towards the goal of comfort. Rather than being subject to the uncertainties of cultural
relativism, comfort is something which exists, which can be striven for, and ultimately
achieved. History is therefore written and read as narrative of progressive development. In
such accounts, Flandrin’s French peasants, Wilhite’s Japanese families, and the airconditioned residents of the USA, occupy different positions along the road to comfort.2
This far I have considered two approaches: one in which cultural diversity takes centre
stage, and in which definitions of comfort are relative, and one which focuses on historical
and technological development, and in which comfort is a state of affairs to be achieved. In
both cases, the way in which comfort is understood reflects the kinds of questions asked and
the orienting interests and ambitions of those who do the asking. A similar case can be
made when we turn to the more specialist study of thermal comfort and the indoor
environment.
Quantifying comfort
Conventional historians follow the quest for comfort without being too precise about the endpoint of the search. This is not so for building researchers who are charged with the more
immediate task of defining environments which meet their users’ needs. Of course, this
challenge has a history of its own. Questions about how many boilers might be required,
how many fans are needed, or what size chillers to include only arise when such
technologies are available and when they can be managed and controlled with some degree
of accuracy. As Rybczynski perceptively observes, the meaning of comfort changed
significantly as a consequence of mass production and industrialisation. He argues that
comfort was transformed “not only qualitatively but also quantitatively” (Rybczynski 1987:
220) as a result. Sure enough, early programmes of comfort research were quite specifically
designed to provide quantitative answers and so resolve otherwise endlessly debates about
what engineers and designers should do. As Gail Cooper explains: “The drive for
quantitative accuracy was fuelled not only by the need for accurate information on which to
build effective designs, but also by the desire to supply engineers with the surety of
quantitative values in the rugged debate before the public in general and regulatory agencies
in particular” (Cooper 1998: 70)
It is important to keep these underlying purposes in view. Whose questions have driven the
agendas of thermal comfort research, and what implications does this have both for the
concept of comfort and for the type of knowledge produced? Reviewing the field in 1993,
Nigel Oseland notes that “much of the research of recent years into thermal comfort has
been commissioned for the air conditioning industry, or, more generally, with the control of
air-conditioning as the background to the study. This is evident from a glance at standards,
and from the ‘philosophy’ behind them. Passive design requires thermal comfort information
of a quite different kind, since the interest no longer focuses on thermostat settings, control
bands, and cycling times” (Oseland and Humphreys 1993: 35).
I’ll return to this issue later but for now there are two aspects to note about the drive for
quantitative answers and accuracy. One, as already mentioned, is the legitimacy afforded
by quantification. The other, just as important, is the search for a scientific and hence
universally relevant means of defining comfort. Methodologies which varied from context to
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culture would be of little help to manufacturers wanting to build a global market, or to
designers and specialists in ergonomics seeking to understand what humans need. For Ole
Fanger, as for many others, “the basic rule of ergonomics” is that “the machine should be
adapted to the human” (Comment in Oseland and Humphreys 1994: 12). Dealing with
bodies more than with people, physiological research promised to generate robust, useful,
and hence culturally neutral analyses of users’ needs. Through producing the type of
knowledge which the field required, this discipline has had an enormous influence on the
subsequent conceptualisation of comfort.
Physiological studies of thermal response, like those of the absorption of alcohol,3 reveal
extensive individual variation. Buildings and systems were never going to be so elastic as to
meet to the thermal-physiological requirements of all possible occupants. Recognising that
design solutions would always be something of a compromise, researchers sought to
establish the parameters of an optimal comfort zone, that is one which best meets the needs
of most of the people, most of the time. Once on course, there was never any doubt about
the possibility of developing a method for defining an optimal comfort zone, even though
there were, and still are, endless discussions about the details of the process.4
Making and marketing comfort
Though important, physiologists are not the only ones involved in making concepts of
comfort. Manufacturers, especially of air-conditioning equipment, recognised that there were
choices to be made about ideal types and images, and that these were (and still are) central
to the future of their business. Given the ability to design an indoor weather system, the
question remained: "what kind of weather should be produced?" Nature offered a number
of ready-made models, hence the ambition of bringing the “best of the beach” indoors, or of
capturing and reproducing the fresh breezes of a mountain resort. The focus on an ideal
form, allied to the ability to quantify its essential ingredients (in terms of temperature,
humidity and so on) represented a significant break through. As Gail Cooper explains:
“When it was shown that no natural climate could consistently deliver perfect comfort
conditions, air conditioning broke free of its geographic limits. When no town could deliver
an ideal climate, all towns became potential markets for air-conditioning” (Cooper 1998: 79).
In this account, comfort appears to be a commercial rather than a physiological issue. 5
From the manufacturers’ perspective, it wasn’t so much a question of meeting human need
as of defining an environment that would sell. Their job was to turn comfort into a mass
commodity which could be actively marketed, promoted, desired and delivered.
Converging conventions
Modern equivalents of fresh mountain breezes and sunny seaside days are now readily
available and frequently experienced by people living far from the hills and shores. The
quantification and commodification of comfort have gone hand in hand. Not only that,
physiologically grounded theories of comfort are now embodied in national and international
standards and made real in buildings all around the world. As Nick Baker rather wryly
observes, “it could be that the very existence of definable standards for mechanicallyconditioned building has been the main cause for the proliferation of air-conditioning” (Baker
1993: 130).
Since cultural conventions, experience and expectation are inter-twined, and since we
should take note of other significant factors (for example, the globalisation of the building
materials industry; increasingly shared images of what constitutes a prestige office block, or
the power of USA and Japanese air conditioning companies) its not such a surprise to
observe social as well as technical convergence. The dynamics of acceptance and
appropriation are not as well documented as they might be but there is some evidence to
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suggest that notions of what constitutes a “normal” indoor environment are on the move. To
give just a few examples, Wilhite’s study of air-conditioning in Japan shows how strongly this
technology is associated with images of Westernisation and modernity and how difficult this
makes it to resist (Wilhite 1996). More conventionally, de Dear has noted that office workers
with experience of air-conditioned, “International Style” buildings in Singapore and Denmark
appear to have “expectations exactly the same as people all over the world.” (Comment in
Oseland and Humphreys 1994: 130).
There are various ways of thinking about this apparently global convergence in what counts
as comfort. One is that physiologically grounded standards are indeed universal, hence it is
no surprise that when appropriate conditions are offered these meet peoples’ expectations.
Another is that people become “addicted” to certain indoor environments – especially those
which are air-conditioned.6 More ordinarily, it may simply be that what is provided as normal
becomes so. Michael Humphreys makes this point quite straightforwardly: “..if you want to
know what people like, you first look at what they have. But what determines the
temperature they have? Partly it is self-fulfilling standards. So, if the standard says ‘you
ought to have 22°C’ you design for 22, run at 22 and people adapt to 22, and you find people
are happy at 22°C. However, this does not mean that 22°C is necessary, you could have
gone for 20 or probably 24°C.” (Oseland and Humphreys 1994: 71).
To summarise, much thermal comfort research has been driven by the question “what
conditions should designers provide?” To be more precise, the question has been “what sort
of indoor climate should they manufacture, now that they have the technologies, systems
and controls to do so? What, in these circumstances, do humans need?” As Oseland
noted, the possibilities of air-conditioning underpin these lines of enquiry. Parallel
requirements for quantification and generalisability related, again, to the interests of those
asking the questions, have further refined the terms of a research agenda, the results of
which have been translated into the built environment. It is worth making one final
observation about the question of responsibility. When physiology is the point of reference,
human need is constituted as a natural not a social condition. In helping to reveal and
specify environments which meet such needs, researchers provide what seems to be an
entirely neutral scientific service. While manufacturers may have benefited from the results,
the purpose was certainly not that of maximising markets. In its own terms, physiological
research sought to help meet, not to make, demand.
Adapting the questions
Thermal comfort research has not been entirely dominated by laboratory based studies of
human physiology. From the 1970s onwards, Michael Humphreys, Nigel Oseland, Fergus
Nichol and others have been documenting and surveying peoples’ experiences of comfort in
the field, that is in homes, in offices and in the open air. The cumulative effect of this has
been the development of the so-called ‘adaptive’ approach, that is, one which builds on
insights into the ways that people adjust to changing environmental conditions both indoors
and out. Following the organising principle of this paper, it is instructive to ask what
questions drive this branch of thermal comfort research.
One response is that field studies generate valuable evidence with which to check methods
and approaches based on laboratory science. At first sight, the question for field
researchers has been, “Do laboratory-based models work in practice?” Cast in this way, their
complementary purpose is to discover whether people say they are comfortable when they
“should be”, as predicted by thermal-physiological research. Where the answer has been
“no”, there have been further efforts to revise or extend the scope of laboratory science, in
order to accommodate observed discrepancies. There have, for instance, been initiatives to
take account of the observation that people trade between various aspects of comfort; that
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visual and acoustic environments are also important; that individuals adapt to different
conditions over time, that there are patterns of feed-back; that building designers, investors,
owners and users might have divergent interests, and so on.
There is a fine line between incremental to-ing and fro-ing of this kind, that is of a kind which
lends support to the basic project of answering the question “What kind of indoor weather
should be manufactured and what do humans need?” and that which is pulled in another
direction altogether.
A second response, and a second reason for investigating meanings and experiences of
comfort in the real world, is to explore the current range of social and technical acceptability.
This is a legitimate exercise in its own right and one which need not be translated back in
terms of the better understanding of “human need”. Adopting a different perspective
altogether, this brand of research takes comfort to be a socially negotiated enterprise, not a
human need. De Dear puts it as follows: “This adaptation hypothesis indicates that one’s
satisfaction with an indoor climate is achieved by a correct matching between the actual
thermal environmental conditions prevailing at that point in time and space, and one’s
thermal expectations of what the indoor climate should be like” As indicated … these all
important expectations result from a confluence of one’s past thermal experiences, cultural
and technical practices”(de Dear 1994).
In other words, what is important is the way in which comfort is defined and managed, and
what is interesting is the diversity of social and technical arrangements involved. With this
conceptual move, the agenda turns inside out.7 The task is not to figure out how to provide
comfort but, rather, to understand the many ways in which buildings and heating and cooling
systems feature – alongside and as part of a co-requisite network of practices and meanings
– in the production of what people take to be normal, comfortable, environments? “What
part do buildings and building systems play in making contemporary conventions of comfort
and how are these understandings entangled and implicated in other taken-for-granted
routines and habits?” With these as the organising questions, a different agenda appears,
and does so just in the nick of time.
Sustainable comfort
Back-of-the-envelope calculations suggest that the global environmental costs of providing
comfort conditions, as enshrined in current building codes and as taken-for-granted in
building practice, are unsustainable in the longer run. According to Nick Baker, “the
conventional application of fixed comfort standards, as described by ASHRAE, CIBSE and
other regulating institutions would preclude passive cooling as an alternative to airconditioning and commit our future built environment to a lifetime of high energy use” (Baker
1993). This is a particular problem since the fastest growing cities in the world are in rather
hot locations. Despite the range of low energy technologies available, the environmental
costs of meeting established comfort standards8 still seem to be impossibly high. This spells
trouble. For the purposes of this discussion, the ‘facts’ of the case are less important than
the issues and predicaments raised by Baker’s analysis.
To put it perhaps too starkly, the provision of conditions which meet users’ needs9 appears
to lead in dangerously unsustainable directions. This is tricky for the technologies and
ideologies associated with the specification and production of the indoor environment are by
now rather well entrenched. Would anyone deliberately flout the codes or produce what
would, by “modern” standards, be defined as a patently uncomfortable building?10 The
environmental price might be high, but who would fly in the face of accumulated
physiological evidence? Confronted by these potentially serious dilemmas, it makes sense
to double check the science.
6
As noted above, the science of comfort is already expanding fast and revised research in the
laboratory and in the field will no doubt lead to more environmentally forgiving definitions of
the physiology and psychology of comfort. Such work promises to justify a wider range of
design solutions and so alleviate otherwise awkward situations in which quests for comfort
and sustainability pull in opposite directions.11
There is another way off the hook. By focusing attention on clients and end-consumers, and
by offering unprecedented levels of choice and control, designers and researchers may be
able to side step the issue altogether. The traditional problem, remember, is how to produce
buildings which meet their users’ needs. As Fanger explains, “the ultimate solution to this is
individual control” (Oseland and Humphreys 1994: 11). In environmental terms, such a
strategy has the further advantage of placing responsibility for energy consumption with
individual users. Again adopting a neutral role, designers would simply provide the means
both for consumption and for conservation. As before, the design task would be to meet
need, but this time it is the need for choice rather than for comfort or sustainability which is
at stake. In this scenario, it is no longer the designer who has to “get it right”. The
specification of comfort and the sustainable management of energy resources are, instead,
matters for negotiation between society’s regulators12 and individual building occupants.
On second thoughts, this is not a very convincing option. Even if the micro-adaptation of
indoor climates was economically and technically plausible, it doesn’t take long to realise that
choices and controls are themselves structured and that various industries and professions
have a hand in determining the range of options on offer. Equally, we have to recall that
buildings shape and form peoples’ expectations of comfort: they do not simply reveal them.
The two routes outlined here - one to modify comfort defining methodologies thereby
legitimising the provision of a wider range of indoor climates; 13 the other to delegate or avoid
responsibility for making such definitions at all - have a number of features in common. Both
presuppose that comfort requirements are there to be met. Methodologies which take note
of human adaptability and which specify broad-band, multi-factoral, multi-dimensional
comfort zones, still have the effect (indeed they still have the purpose) of reifying and
reproducing certain forms of indoor environment. The resulting bubble of “comfort” may be
much larger than before but it is still a bubble, and still one which is defined in a cultural
vacuum. While there is scope for recognising individual variation, indeed that is a major part
of the enterprise, there is no place for cultural diversity or historical evolution. Equally, the
possibility that peoples’ expectations change because of the built environments they inhabit
is bracketed out of the equation. Individual human responses are separated, neatly and
cleanly, from the cultures and conventions of which they are a part.
This has the dual effect of stripping comfort from context: not only in terms of the broad
sweep of social change, but also, and at an everyday level, from the network of habits, and
routines which sustain what we might term comfort regimes. By this I mean the package of
expectations, practices and conventions - certainly relating to the built environment, but also
to lunch-times, to clothing, to the difference between morning and evening and to the
patterns of family and office life - which constitute “normality” for us, just as for Flandrin’s
peasants, Wilhite’s Japanese families, or Cooper’s air-conditioned Americans.
Thermal comfort research agendas have been framed around issues over which designers
and manufacturers have some control, also being steered by the technologies available and
the precision with which indoor environments can be manufactured and managed. Changes
in the world around (for instance, in the meaning of office work, the gobalisation of the
clothing industry, etc.) are incorporated in so far as they are translated into variables and
factors taken into account in building design. Types of clothing consequently represent
something to be measured and anticipated, but not understood. If we stand back from the
building itself and address the bigger picture, it is evidently important to consider the coevolution of clothing and the built environment. Likewise, hours of occupancy represent not
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just a condition to be accommodated, but a dynamic indicator of the temporal re-jigging of
society, a process that may well relate to, say the waning of the siesta, or the diffusion of airconditioning.
To pick up this thread of argument and take it further, I suggest that thermal comfort
researchers would do well to change direction. Instead of seeking to “meet” needs, 14 the
more appropriate task is to investigate the part which buildings play in defining what counts
as comfort and in transforming comfort regimes. This move has the further effect of reframing debate about the relationship between sustainability and comfort and of introducing
a different way of thinking about choice, change and environmental responsibility.
Concentrating on comfort regimes as a whole, two points are clear. First there are many
different ways of achieving what people take to be comfortable environments. For example,
some regimes take high levels of technological servicing for granted, others do not. In some
cases cultures and histories are woven around cooling, in others heating is the focus. The
examples with which I began suggest that clothing; cows and air-conditioning have each
contributed, in different degrees and combinations, to the preservation and maintenance of
normality. These examples also illustrate the second point, that comfort-related meanings
and practices change over time. We only have to look around to see that this is the case.
What does this mean for environmental sustainability? When evaluated in terms of energy
consumption some conventions and practices are evidently more demanding than others.
With an average of eleven light bulbs, the Norwegian living room is not a shining example of
efficiency. In this case, the taken-for-granted technologies and aesthetics of cosiness are
rather energy intensive. By comparison, other ways of life - such as those which revolve
around the siesta, which positively value the changing seasons, or which simply do not presuppose elaborate systems of heating and cooling technology - have undoubted energyrelated benefits. In reflecting on this diversity it is important to recognise that the built
environment is only part of the total comfort jig-saw. Questions of energy consumption and
sustainability relate to an ensemble of habits, practices, and meanings, not to the building
alone. And, from an environmental perspective, it is transformation of these comfort regimes
which is what really counts.
This brings us back to issues of choice, change and responsibility. We know relatively little
about how cultures of comfort evolve but we do know that building designers and
manufacturers have helped form images and expectations of normality, some of which imply
high levels of energy consumption. To some extent, this process has been driven by the
pursuit of answers to the question: “What do users’ need”. If they were to back off this line
of enquiry and the ideology which goes with it, designers and thermal researchers might
invest their energies and resources in an agenda geared towards the development of
solutions which maintained and enhanced the current plurality of comfort regimes. Europe
is, even now, a wonderful laboratory for such an exercise. Working with, rather than against,
cultural variety the task would be one of deliberately extending the repertoire of what people
take to be normal indoor environments. Rather than using the results of field studies to
refine or modify standardised methods for specifying comfortable buildings, they might be reinterpreted as evidence of the range and composition of existing comfort regimes. 15 Better
knowledge of this kind could be used to tailor culturally appropriate low energy design
strategies and enrich the range of images, models and technologies of comfort on offer.
To finish, designers, researchers, and technologists are implicated in producing systems,
buildings, and ideas which shape peoples’ expectations of comfort. From an environmental
perspective, the challenge is to make and preserve a multiplicity of social understandings of
comfort. That way there will be altogether less pressure to stretch environmental resources
in pursuit of a common but nonetheless socially constructed goal. This implies a new role for
those who study the indoor environment. Rather than averaging and optimising – a route
8
which serves to condense concepts of comfort - the task is to understand and extend the
limits of energy beneficial variety.
This might sound a bit idealistic, especially if it means holding back the endless escalation of
consumption or resisting the relentless march of air-conditioning. Maybe it is. Yet we have
already seen quite substantial revisions in the science of comfort. These moves do not
signal an outbreak of cultural relativism, but they do make it possible to offer a more varied
repertoire of “acceptable” indoor environments. The notion of “going back” to natural
ventilation clashes somewhat with a conventional model of technological progress but
progress is not always linear. As Simon Guy has documented, air-conditioning and natural
ventilation have swung in and out of favour depending, in part, on the relative power of
investors and occupiers in French and British property markets (Guy and Shove 2000).16 As
this work suggests, we should not simply assume that the comfort regimes of the future will
require ever more energy intensive servicing. They may, but equally they may not.
The idea that designers should meet their users’ needs has made it harder to recognise the
extent to which those needs are made by the environments on offer. It is all the more
difficult to appreciate this point since the characteristics of the indoor environments on offer
have been informed by programmes of social, technical, and physiological research quite
explicitly designed to answer the question “what do people need?” However, if we do break
out of this loop, and if we do acknowledge that thermal comfort research has a constitutive
role in the social construction of demand, we are obliged to think again about the nature of
social and environmental responsibility. What part have designers and researchers played
in actively constructing more and less sustainable cultures of comfort? What are they doing
now and what might they do in the future? In practical terms, these questions suggests the
possibility – even the necessity - of thinking about ways of producing buildings which rescript peoples’ understandings of comfort and which actively contribute to the formation of
more sustainable regimes.17 At first sight this is a highly controversial conclusion. What
right do designers, researchers, and manufacturers have to influence what people want? But
on second thoughts it is perhaps not such a radical view. After all, the history of the indoor
environment suggests that this is what has been happening all along.
Notes
1
2
3
4
5
6
Some would draw a distinction between needs and wants. For the purposes of this
paper I take what are referred to as needs to be as socially constructed as wants.
While it is true that human beings perish under some climatic conditions, the bulk of
thermal comfort research, and the bulk of this discussion, is not concerned with such
extremes.
It is not entirely clear where the path ends, or what the future holds. The motto of the
CIBSE is “For the greater comfort of mankind”, perhaps suggesting that the quest is
endless.
See McAndrew and Edgerton (1970) for a wonderful discussion of the culture and
physiology of drinking.
The making of comfort in this way has parallels with the making of what Armstrong
refers to as the “normal” patient (1983). Statistical analysis of many individual cases
made it possible to define and operationalise the concept of “normal” progress.
Normality is then used as a benchmark against which to judge individual medical
careers.
The two are clearly related: physiology legitimised the notion of an ideal climate, and
related research helped isolate relevant parameters thereby allowing engineers to
reproduce outdoor environments indoors.
This idea has some currency but again we should be wary. Addiction is generally
associated with individual physical or biological dependence. However, various
9
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
authors have investigated the social organisation of addiction, see, for example,
Howard Becker (1963) on drugs, or MacAndew and Edgerton (1970) on alcohol.
Not all ‘adaptive’ approaches share this cultural view of comfort. As I have implied,
field research can be just as readily guided by the more conventional ambitions of
improving the specification of indoor environments which meet peoples’ needs.
Again it is important to recall the fact that these standards have been invisibly
influenced by the problem of designing for air-conditioning. That they then assume
and inadvertently favour its use is not entirely surprising.
That is of what they needs are, as revealed by methods enshrined in current codes
and standards.
One important but little noticed side-effect of an agreed method for specifying
comfort is that such methods also define discomfort. Even if the boundaries are
fuzzy in practice, the rhetorical power of the two-part classification is clear.
Discomfort is obviously something to avoid.
Many people argue that well designed low energy buildings are more comfortable
than those which rely on mechanical heating and cooling. This may be so. As ever,
it all depends on the methods used to define comfort, and on whether it is taken to be
an absolute or a relative concept.
There is a risk that given free rein, building occupants might opt for unsustainably
energy intensive solutions. Recognising this, building researchers suggest the need
for a backdrop of societal control in the form of energy-related building regulation.
I do not mean to suggest that thermal comfort researchers are cynically re-defining
results to suit a new environmental agenda. Laboratory-based methods have been
subject to revision for a variety of different reasons.
.. while inadvertently making them all the time!
Equipment currently used to test peoples’ responses to particular lighting conditions
in order to define optimal solutions and strategies could, for instance, be used to
survey the different cultures of lighting across Europe. The results would be used not
to generate transferable conclusions about the visual environment but to reveal the
scope for adopting and pursuing different methods and approaches and for
identifying culturally viable approaches to energy conservation.
This work begs a number of other important questions. Thermal comfort research
has not unreasonably supposed that buildings are for people. In practice they are
also vehicles for making money and for extracting value from land and capital. If airconditioning helps in this process then it is likely to be provided whatever the building
occupiers’ need or want.
A similar point is made by Jaap Jelsma in an unpublished paper, “Philosophy Meets
Design, or how the masses are missed (and revealed again) in environmental policy
and eco-design”, given at a summer school on Consumption, Sustainability and
Everyday Life, Lancaster University, August 1999
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