Conference Agenda

Understanding how individuals experience and perceive the indoor olfactory environment, or smellscape, is essential for achieving indoor air quality (IAQ) that is not only olfactory neutral but also positively perceived by occupants. To enhance the indoor smellscape, it is key to determine how to “measure” it, particularly regarding the perceptual dimensions to explore when surveying people, e.g., in post-occupancy evaluations. In this study, a set of 118 descriptors in English language, originally developed for assessing other sensory domains, was tested for its applicability to indoor smellscapes with the assistance of 10 experts in olfactory perception and IAQ. From this, 37 attributes were retained. Subsequently, an online survey was conducted with 200 English-speaking participants, ensuring a gender-balanced sample. In this survey, respondents were asked to imagine themselves in an office setting and describe their emotional responses to various smells. This process led to the identification of an additional 190 attributes. Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques were employed to cluster the combined set of 227 attributes (37 expert-validated and 190 participant-derived), resulting in 79 distinct descriptors that capture people's emotional and sensory responses to the olfactory environment in offices. Among the most frequently used attributes were "familiar" (50%), "clean" (20%), "stale" (20%), "fresh" (15%), "musty" (13%), "warm" (13%), "sterile" (12%), and "artificial" (11%). These attributes were categorized into affective (47%), space-related (22%), perceptual (19%), time-related (8%), cognitive (2%), and physiological (2%) dimensions. This research represents an important preliminary step toward developing a comprehensive model to characterize smellscapes, providing a useful tool for designing IAQ strategies that improve user satisfaction in office environments.

Indoor Environmental Quality (IEQ) is a critical determinant of occupant health, comfort, and productivity. As indoor environments become increasingly central to human activity, optimizing IEQ through design and operational strategies has become a pressing concern in building science. This paper presents a systematic and critical review of 51 peer-reviewed studies published between 2010 and 2024 to identify and categorize the key variables influencing IEQ. The analysis classifies 36 variables into six overarching categories: design features, building characteristics, occupant characteristics, environmental parameters, physiological responses, and outdoor conditions. Among these, operative temperature, relative humidity, and clothing level were the most frequently examined, underscoring their foundational role in thermal comfort and perceived air quality. Conversely, variables related to physiological responses and psychological well-being were underexplored. The review highlights a significant gap in integrated approaches that consider variable interactions and dynamic changes in indoor environments. Future work should focus on prioritizing high-impact variables using sensitivity and uncertainty analyses, developing context-specific standards, and balancing health and comfort outcomes. This study offers valuable insights for architects, engineers, and policymakers striving to design occupant-centric, health-promoting indoor spaces.

Subjective assessment of the indoor environmental quality (IEQ) and multi-domain comfort depends on environmental parameters as well as on contextual and individual characteristics. The latter is even more important in educational buildings, where students share the same space, affecting their comfort and response in multiple domains. This work presents the impact of personal (i.e., gender, clothing level, body mass index, age, use of glasses) and contextual (i.e., sitting position inside the classroom and orientation/outdoor view) factors on the students’ sensation votes (thermal/air quality/visual/acoustic) collected in 50 classrooms (825 questionnaires) during regular lectures. First, we identified which environmental variables were significantly correlated to sensation votes in each of the four domains and studied the role of personal/contextual factors on cross-domain interactions through multi-linear regression. Then, the impact of categorized levels of personal/contextual factors on sensation votes was studied through covariance analysis and post-hoc tests. This analysis determined which of these factors would enable different responses when exposed to the same environmental conditions.

The results showed that gender and age affect multi-domain sensation votes, while body mass index and clothing level affect thermal sensation. Males have a larger sensitivity to environmental conditions in the thermal and IAQ domains. Clothing adaptation varies depending on gender, sitting position and body mass index. Younger students express higher thermal sensation votes and are more sensitive to noisy environments. In addition, sitting distance from windows affects thermal, IAQ, and visual sensation, while sitting distance from the teacher mainly affects visual and acoustic sensation.