From Intuition to Calculation: What drives Occupant’s Thermal Comfort Decisions?

Abstract

Thermal comfort in (indoor) environments is a multi-faceted phenomenon influenced by technological, cultural, and individual factors. While technically considered as matter of achieving/maintaining specific temperature- and humidity levels, as well as air quality standards, our research proposes a broader, ethnographic approach to understand thermal comfort as a socially constructed and dynamic practice. Drawing on key theoretical insights from Madsen and Gram-Hanssen (2017) and Shove et al. (2008), we explore how comfort is not merely a physical state, but a socially shared understanding embedded in everyday practices and interactions with the built environment and technological infrastructures. Recent research reckoned that the dimension of knowledge and skills people use for everyday heating and cooling practices – specifically, the roles of embodied knowledge, experience-based know-how, and their intersections – are still not comprehensively explored (Martin & Larsen, 2024). Further, emerging technologies like smart thermostats and IoT-approaches are introducing new dimensions to this discourse: The implementation of “intelligent” algorithms and automated decision-making (Velkova et al. 2022) raises important questions about how such developments shape our perception and knowledge of thermal comfort and how they affect our daily routines. To address this, we propose utilizing a bundle of ethnographic methods, including qualitative interviews, mental mappings, and video ethnography (Pink et al. 2015), to capture the nuanced and often invisible elements of knowledge that may contribute to – or even contradict against – thermal comfort. Our aim is to investigate the various forms of knowledge about heating, cooling, and ventilation, and to trace the origins of learned behavior. We want to find out what people know about thermal comfort and where they derive their knowledge from (e.g. advice literature, “gut feeling”, apps, experience, common sense, scientific knowledge, “traditional” and/or social media…). Our empirical findings can thus help developing advising strategies that prepare individuals to adapt to both, changing climates and changing technologies. This paper provides the key concepts and theoretical grounding of a proposed method tool box. This toolbox is currently under testing in the academic framework of the TU Wien via a course bundle for graduate students, in which about 30 ethnographies of thermal comfort based on the aforementioned theoretical background are currently under creation.