Buildings are beautiful, complex objects — even the ones that leak or smell or creak. As a professional working in or on buildings, you have probably received enough “advice” to know that everyone has an opinion about buildings, from your taxi driver to your granduncle. While being bombarded with “suggestions” on how you should do your job is irritating, it is worth understanding why buildings evoke these sorts of passionate, emotional reactions. We live, work, learn, heal, and meet inside them. Some of our dearest memories are made indoors, and increasingly, we are becoming an indoor species.
In this article, I will discuss why measuring and improving the quality of the indoor environment is essential to our experience of buildings and their impact on our health. I will discuss easy, small steps we can take from a paradigm of little or no measurement (think thermostats) to one of ubiquitous measurement everywhere, all the time. We will discuss how this can be achieved at a reasonable cost, and how the hardware and data can be managed.
The overwhelming scientific evidence indicates that our brains and bodies are still those of a great ape that evolved for open spaces, one that has lived in mud or concrete or steel towers for only a very short period of its existence as a species. This means that, for the sake of our physical and mental wellbeing, we must replicate indoors the ‘natural’ and health-giving aspects of the ‘outdoors’. This can mean several things, including interaction with nature as well as opportunities for exercise, leisure, and socialising. Most importantly, it means developing indoor spaces that promote human health, often by replicating several aspects of the outdoor environment.
Read Dr. Parag Rastogi's full article, Measure for Measure: A graded approach to measuring, and acting upon, healthy indoor environmental quality outcomes.
Learn more about Dr. Rastogi's work with arbnco, one of Arc's integration partners. Formed in 2012, arbnco is a building performance technology company developing disruptive and scalable solutions for the global market.