Understanding the relationship between residential environment, social exclusion, and life satisfaction of private renters in Shenzhen

The recent revival of the private rented sector in many regions highlights the importance of understanding the well-being of private renters. While there is a consensus that private renters are less satisfied with their life than homeowners, little attention has been given to examining the life satisfaction of private renters from different...

The infuence of the physical home work environment on perceived productvity during the COVID-19 pandemic

Due to the COVID-19 crisis, Dutch employees were told to work from home as much as possible. Homeworking can have benefits both for employees and employers, as some experience a productivity increase and a better work-life balance. However, it is also harder for employers to measure and monitor employees’ performance and for the employee it can...

Urban, suburban or rural? Understanding preferences for the residential environment

There are two ongoing trends that lead to changing preferences for the built environment. One concerns a demographic transition into more but smaller, and older, households. The other concerns greater possibilities to satisfy residential preferences due to rising incomes and technological advances. The current study explores the preference...

A circular economy life cycle costing model (CE-LCC) for building components

The building industry is responsible for the highest resource use, amount of waste and emissions of all industries. The principles of the Circular Economy (CE) could offer an approach to create a more sustainable built environment. For a transition towards a circular built environment, a comprehensive assessment method is needed to support...

Polaris: Providing context aware navigation in spreadsheets

Spreadsheets are a successful example of an end-user programming language, and the spreadsheet paradigm shares several characteristics like composition, selection, and repetition with programming languages. There are compelling reasons that spreadsheets are code. For most programming languages, developers are supported by powerful IDEs. However,...

Optimal Component Selection in Impedance-Type Haptic Devices

A teleoperation system consists of an operator interface (master) controlling a slave system in a remote virtual environment. When the slave’s environmental forces are fed back to the operator, this is called haptic force-feedback. An impedance-type master device ideally has a large range of stable achievable impedances, i.e. a small free space...

Understanding preferences for the residential environment using Affordance-based theory

The decreasing importance of socio-economic factors in choosing a place to live gives more room to other motivational factors. These can be examined using affordance-based theory (Gibson, 1979), which explores what use the environment has to the user. In a telephone survey, 738 respondents were asked for their preferred residential environment...

Exergy in the built environment. The added value of exergy in the assessment and development of energy systems for the built environment.

This doctoral research studied the added value of exergy for the assessment and development of energy systems for the built environment, aiming at a reduced need for high-quality energy input. Currently the analysis and development of energy systems for the built environment is based on the energy concept. Energy however gives an incomplete...