Thermal Comfort at Home

Abstract

Thermal comfort at home sits at the intersection of household energy use and everyday well-being. Buildings account for around a fifth of recent global energy demand growth, most of it driven by households, while access to safe indoor temperatures remains unevenly distributed across regions and income groups. Solutions available only to a limited share of the population are therefore unlikely to reduce emissions at the scale the climate problem requires. This thesis adopts IKEA’s Democratic Design as a lens for exploring how thermal comfort at home can be made both sustainable and accessible, grounded in how comfort is actually sought and lived day to day. The project began with a literature scan and an exploratory survey, which together produced a framework of the factors shaping thermal comfort experience and identified the aspects most actionable through design. In a later stage, the project drew insights from user interviews and digital ethnography that produced a set of desirability attributes that translate Democratic Design into thermal comfort terms. These attributes reflect people’s desires and expectations for thermal comfort solutions and together with identified insight themes, led to four refined concepts and functional prototypes: a bamboo block mat, an air-insulated blind, a no-drill awning, and a thermal rhythm broadcast service. An analysis of our creative process results converged into a Design Approach matrix that offers structure for future design interventions for thermal comfort at home.