As our understanding of health has evolved, the impact of the built environment is even clearer. Yet the Design Council’s 2018 report into ‘Healthy Placemaking’ showed that healthy design interventions are often excluded from proposals, and are regularly considered a “luxury” rather than a necessity. However, this mindset fails to recognise the positive impact that healthy buildings have on occupant wellbeing and productivity – factors that we cannot afford to ignore.
It’s estimated that we spend around 90% of our lives indoors. So, it’s vital that our buildings are designed and built to optimise Indoor Environmental Quality (IEQ). This involves balancing several key factors, such as:
To create a truly healthy building, these elements must be maintained even in the face of changing weather and seasons, including extreme temperatures, wind, or heavy rain.
There is a growing body of evidence demonstrating that good levels of thermal comfort can measurably improve the well-being and productivity of building occupants in a wide variety of contexts.
Our experience of temperature can be affected by a wide range of personal and environmental factors, from our health and clothing to the air temperature where we are the in room. Measures of thermal comfort attempt to consider all these factors and determine whether occupants are likely to feel too hot, too cold, or just right. This can pose a significant challenge for designers as the personal nature of many of the factors means that, within any given space, individuals’ levels of thermal comfort will vary.
Guidance for determining thermal comfort is available for designers through standards such as BS EN ISO 7730:2005 – Ergonomics of the thermal environment. The standard uses two indices — predicted mean vote (PMV) and percentage people dissatisfied (PPD) — in conjunction with local thermal comfort criteria. These help to determine the environmental conditions considered acceptable for general thermal comfort. A wide range of measures are available to control thermal comfort and the most suitable solution will vary from project to project.
To understand the impact of maintaining a comfortable thermal environment, we can look to a report by the Institute of Education, University College London. It found that students’ cognitive performance improved by 6% to 8% where thermal comfort was improved in their learning environments. Furthermore, the ‘Clever Classrooms’ report concluded that a well-designed classroom could boost a pupils learning progress by up to 16% over the course of a year, and found that 'naturalness', i.e. light, temperature and air quality, are the predominant factors influencing this progress.
In addition to thermal comfort, indoor air quality and daylighting levels were also found to have a significant impact on productivity.
Indoor air quality can be negatively affected by several factors, including high levels of Volatile Organic Compounds (VOCs), and has a substantial impact on health and efficiency. In a study from the World Green Building Council (WGBC), Cundall found that after improving indoor air quality in their new UK office absenteeism dropped by more than 58% and staff turnover reduced by 27%. The combined impact of these two outcomes delivered savings of almost €225,000 per year.
Access to daylight is equally important, as it improves our visual acuity and plays a vital role in reinforcing our circadian rhythm, which helps to regulate our sleep cycle. It has been found that staff in offices with no natural daylight sleep on average 46 minutes less than their light-receiving counterparts, which can increase the likelihood of missing work or making errors.
Improving the productivity, health and well-being of occupants isn’t the only benefit of creating a healthy building. ‘Healthiness’ is also a key aspect of voluntary building standards such as BREEAM, WELL and LEED, which make buildings more desirable for prospective tenants and increase their value.
With so many environmental elements to be considered, identifying materials that will address multiple factors can provide a cost and time effective approach to creating healthy buildings. For example, insulation is a fundamental part of any modern construction and can have a significant impact on space, energy efficiency and human comfort. Innovations such as our QuadCore technology offer the opportunity to address many of the key factors needed for good IEQ.
The slimmer construction of QuadCore products allows more natural light to enter the building, as well as increasing the available internal space. The high-performance insulation core and airtight construction help to improve the efficiency of heating and ventilation systems. This allows for greater thermal comfort as temperature is more easily regulated. QuadCore® solutions can also help to safeguard indoor air quality, as it has low emissions of Volatile Organic Compounds (VOCs).
As awareness of the positive impact our environment can have on productivity, health and well-being grows, so too does the demand for buildings which can effectively exploit it. By considering IEQ and proactively incorporating healthy interventions in the design and construction of our buildings, we can create more valuable assets, protect occupants from illness, increase productivity, and potentially improve retention or absenteeism rates in workplaces.