Ten questions concerning well-being in the built environment

Acoustics for Supportive and Healthy Buildings: Emerging Themes on Indoor Soundscape Research

“…Control and adaptive environmental comfort opportunities can be positively employed to allow building occupants to personalize their environment according to their intra and inter-individual changing needs and to experience acoustic delight from temporal and spatial sensorial variability [11,28,40]. At the same time, these considerations can provide designers with a wider variety of indoor environmental design parameters.…”

“…At the same time, these considerations can provide designers with a wider variety of indoor environmental design parameters. This type of holistic design can also maximize the benefits to be achieved from building energy performance capabilities [11,40].…”

“…In response, a user-centered theory of building design has been proposed [2,9] that acknowledges the active role of building occupants and incorporates their interactions with the built environment and advocates for more complex comfort models, addressing cultural, psychological, behavioral, social, and contextual dimensions [3] while taking into account the multi-sensory nature of human experience [10][11][12]. Given the complex and holistic nature of this framework, the use of qualitative methods is appropriate to collect in-depth data about user experiences in the built environment [2,4].…”

“…Furthermore, this research underpins a recent shift in the industry from producing minimally acceptable spaces to moving beyond occupants' lack of complaints and diseases with a new emphasis on how the built environment can actually support task performance and enhance people's health and well-being [10][11][12][13][14][15]. This focus on health and well-being is made evident from the rise of certification protocols that explicitly address these aspects, such as WELL [16], Fitwel [17], and the Living Buildings Challenge [18].…”

“…The United Nations Sustainable Development Goals [26] require the sustainability debate to be elevated to include aspects related to social and environmental justice [27] alongside climate change and resource concerns [20]. Spatial and temporal sensory variability, together with opportunities for personal adaptation and control are encouraged for offering pleasure and delight [11,[28][29][30]. New technologies from medical sciences (e.g., wearable sensors) are gradually being introduced to assess the health aspects of human responses to environmental stimuli or to improve comfort models on the basis of occupants' physiological response [31,32].…”