Lecture from the 6th VELUX Daylight Symposium “Daylight as a driver of change” that took place in London on 2-3 September 2015. For more information visit [ Ссылка ]

ABSTRACT

To embed the diversity and variability of human needs as foundational elements of daylighting design and put human occupants back at the core of the building question, we need to reach out to fundamental discoveries from neuroscience, biology and other fields, which will bring new insights and a deeper understanding of how we interact with our environment. The multiplicity and variability of our needs regarding (day)light exposure have indeed been a topic of investigation for years now in photobiology and psychophysics, though have not yet penetrated the design realm as dynamic models of human response.

Humans need to be in an environment conducive to health and have physiological light exposure needs, whose time- and spectrum-dependent non-visual effects we only start to understand. On the other hand, users of a space often need to perform tasks for which comfortable visual conditions are needed, to which we respond with head and gaze dynamics that psychophysics can help us better recognize.

Finally, any attentive witness to a space seeks to enjoy its play of light and dark. Perception of daylight is the primary interpreter of the materiality and dynamism of any architectural space. As a result, while daylight as a subjectively perceived visual effect is actually very hard to use as a design factor, it is often what drives decisions. It is time to bring these exciting new research perspectives back into the design realm in a way it can interactively, dynamically and effectively fuel the creative design process: we have access to the essential ingredients of human-responsive design, now we need to cook. This paper will discuss ongoing research regarding the assessment of daylighting performance by considering three interpretations of “well-being” in a space: as a human inhabitant of a living space, as a user of a (work)space, and as a witness of a delightful space.

Marilyne Andersen is Professor of Sustainable Construction Technologies and Dean of the School of Architecture, Civil and Environmental Engineering (ENAC) at EPFL. She is also head of the Interdisciplinary Laboratory of Performance-Integrated Design (LIPID) whose research activities focus on building performance in the architectural context in general, and the use and optimization of daylight in buildings in particular. Before joining EPFL, she was Associate Professor at MIT, USA where she founded the MIT Daylighting Lab in 2004. She holds an MSc in Physics and specialized in daylighting through her PhD at LESO, EPFL and as a Visiting Scholar at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, USA.

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