Refresh: Remodeling Building Design Sustainability from a Human Centered Approach

到2050年，超过三分之二的世界人口将居住在城市，这使得可持续城市成为里约+20峰会的一个关键主题。超过40%的英国人在建筑环境中的办公室封闭空间里从事知识工作，过着他们的工作生活。英国国内生产总值的40%以上是由在这些建筑中开展的知识工作推动的。虽然这些建筑必须满足基本的环境和安全标准，但建筑规范主要是围绕物理基础设施的性能来定义的，而不是捕捉城市建筑中人的性能。事实上，能源议程最近的重点是让这些工作环境变得密闭，从而尽可能地提高能源效率。但是，如果这种能源效率正在以我们的福祉为代价，进而以我们为环境、经济和社会可持续发展做出贡献的业绩和能力为代价，那该怎么办？我们都熟悉在过热、闷热、似乎没有气流的建筑物中工作，以及我们的工作表现似乎因此受到了影响。然而，这样的环境可能完全符合环境质量的建筑规范。显然，有必要能够量化室内空气对人体性能的影响，并确定什么是质量性能的最佳选择。我们假设，糟糕的室内环境是基于(1)什么是容易测量的(例如，能源/碳)和(2)没有适当考虑环境对人类认知能力的影响来接近建筑性能的结果。糟糕的设计可能会对知识工作所需的创造力和创新产生如此关键的影响，以至于我们需要彻底转移设计重点。这种彻底的重新考虑可能会表明，即使是对设计的微小改变，而且对关于建筑和个人的信息的呈现方式的微小改变，也可能会显著提高性能。更新项目的目标是将人放在建筑性能的中心，并开发新的测量和模型，以更好地捕捉这些交互的复杂性。我们计划测量当地环境及其周围环境对人类在该环境中表现的动态变化。这些措施将为我们提供创建新的建筑环境模式的方法，这些模式反过来将可用于帮助制定考虑到这些环境中的人类福祉的建筑质量政策。这些模型还将帮助我们设计新的环境交互工具。例如，当前的许多注意力都集中在智能电表上，以鼓励我们改变能源使用方面的行为。这是我们与建筑物互动的一个非常单向的观点；它都是为了人类而建造的。然而，如果大楼对我们的状态和任务有所了解，情况会怎样？当我们明显变得行动迟缓时，我们是否能够展示一个相互作用的测量仪，它可能会建议我们打开窗户或出去散散步呼吸一些空气，以完成一项任务？我们的建议将信息和通信技术与工程科学的新组合结合在一起。因此，我们的结果将影响一系列学科。总体而言，我们的研究明确旨在开发一种方法来评估室内气候对人类行为的影响，因为室外小气候会因周围环境的变化而发生变化。我们将发现动态变化如何使我们不仅创造一个可持续的室内环境，而且创造一个可持续的室内环境。我们将加强目前以能源为主的建筑环境研究组合，从整体角度出发，整合城市小气候、通风和人类表现之间的明确反馈。我们的方法将为如何在不影响生产率的情况下实现能源效率目标提供指导。

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.