Tuesday 26 May 2015

Healthy Buildings .... oh and acoustics


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.