Category: Comfort

Working From Home During the Covid-19 Crisis: Window Views May Help Emotional States, Productivity and Comfort

Working From Home During the Covid-19 Crisis: Window Views May Help Emotional States, Productivity and Comfort

Millions of people are working at home to prevent the spread of Covid-19, creating stress and impacting our well-being and productivity. Science shows that time spent in nature may improve our health and emotions, however, when we are not able to be in nature physically, we may derive benefits simply by access to windows with views. A study recently published by CBE found that a view from a window has positive impacts on emotion, cognitive performance and thermal comfort.

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New Online Design Tool Enables Accurate Design with Ceiling Fans

New Online Design Tool Enables Accurate Design with Ceiling Fans

CBE recently launched an online tool for designing with ceiling fans, making it easier for designers to create highly energy efficient and comfortable spaces. The tool was created based on years of research that have demonstrated that ceiling fans can keep a person cool while using only a fraction of the energy required by air conditioning.

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Designing for Experiential Delight

Designing for Experiential Delight

Building standards and conventional practice are all about ’reducing the negative‘ — but what if the goal is to ’enhance the positive‘ instead? Aiming to create environments that are not only comfortable and healthy, but are connected to nature, provide a sense of place, and are a delight to be in. Designing for experience requires us to embrace a broader view of experiential aesthetics, going beyond the primacy of vision to recognize broader sensual qualities that contribute to the beauty and memorability of space.

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Lear Innovation Ventures: Driving the Future of Mobile Environments

Lear Innovation Ventures: Driving the Future of Mobile Environments

Innovation is all about answering the question: “What if?” For example, what if we could transfer the latest research for monitoring and controlling building environments to vehicle environments? Questions like this are driving the future of mobility for Lear Innovation Ventures, a new CBE partner focused on accelerating the pace of innovation and collaboration around autonomous, connected, electrified and shared mobility trends.

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Measuring Workplace Productivity: Key Variables and Future Directions

Measuring Workplace Productivity: Key Variables and Future Directions

This year marks the 25th anniversary of the publication of a seminal paper from Rocky Mountain Institute, “Greening the Building and the Bottom Line,” making the case that green buildings’ unique features may improve employee productivity. Since then interest in this topic has remained strong, and several studies by CBE and others have contributed to our collective understanding of workplace productivity; in this post we describe our related work with a focus on key variables.

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New Technologies Offer Solutions for Understanding Indoor Environments

New Technologies Offer Solutions for Understanding Indoor Environments

Companies aspiring to sustainability and wellness have focused on managing workplace indoor environmental quality (IEQ), however undertaking IEQ measurements in a reliable manner can be challenging. In this post we discuss why continuous monitoring technologies are ideal for evaluating building IEQ performance.

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Berkeley Researchers Sweep Best Paper Awards

Berkeley Researchers Sweep Best Paper Awards

Researchers from CBE and our collaborators from SinBerBEST (a Berkeley-Singapore research collaboration) were awarded all three 2018 Best Paper Awards given by Building and Environment, an international journal that publishes original research related to building science and human interaction with the built environment.

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