Comfort-as-a-Service: Designing a User-Oriented Thermal Comfort Artifact for Office Buildings

Abstract: Most people spend up to 90 % of their time indoors. However, literature in the field of facility management and related disciplines mostly focus on energy and cost saving aspects of buildings. Especially in the area of commercial buildings, only few articles take a user-centric perspective and none of them considers the subjectivity of thermal comfort. This work addresses this research gap and aims to optimize individual environmental comfort in open office environments, taking advantage of changes in modern office infrastructure and considering actual user feedback without interfering with existing systems. Based on a Design Science Research approach, we first perform a user experience testing in an exemplary corporate office building. Furthermore, we build a mechanism to gather user feedback on environmental comfort. Based on this, we build a machine learning model including different IoT data sources (e.g. building data and weather data) with an average coefficient of determination of 41.5%. Using these insights, we are able to suggest current individual comfort zones within the building and help employees to make better informed decisions on where to sit or what to wear, to feel comfortable and work productively. Therefore, we contribute to the body of knowledge by proposing a user-centric design within a cross-disciplinary context on the basis of analytical processes.