User centric assessment of comfort and health in offices – an explorative field study

Abstract

An indoor Climate Label was developed for office buildings. To determine subjective comfort levels one time per year a survey is carried out under all office occupants. The goal of our study was to develop a method which could continuously gather comfort feedback from office occupants, requiring a minimal level of perceived effort and minimal distraction. During the summer of 2022 a pilot study in an existing Dutch office building was conducted. User feedback was gathered via two methods, self-standing vote boxes and QR codes placed on tables in the office rooms. Both methods were compared to use of a yearly web-based survey list. Based on the analysis of the results gathered, the vote boxes led to a relatively high response rate as compared to use of the QR codes. This was most likely due to the ease of giving feedback using the vote boxes as compared to the QR codes. Data from the vote box, as compared to results obtained using the yearly survey, yielded similar average perceived comfort levels. Scores from the vote box, tended to be more extreme in terms of positive or negative votes, as compared to data collected using the yearly survey.