Last week I presented at the Healthy Buildings 2015 Europe conference in Eindhoven. I was
excited about this gig because, in a former life as a Government researcher, I
used to attend this series of conferences. So I was particularly interested in learning how
the science of healthy buildings had progressed since I last attended in the late
90s.
It’s an academic conference and most of the presenters are
researchers from scientific institutions. I think it’s also fair to say that most
attendees had an engineering or physics background but I did find a couple of
fellow psychologists (who spoke my language) and I also spotted a token architect.
As a consequence, we were bombarded with complex statistics and even more complicated graphs; and
we were impressed by studies of 2,000, 4,000 and even 8,000 people observed
over several years. I admired that the researchers presented some very detailed
and rigorous scientific experiments which must have required many many hours of
diligent dedication.